Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism

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CHAPTER 9: Fascism Conquers Mussolini

THIS NEW army's tactics BECAME KNOWN AS SQUADRISMO. Flying detachments of Black Shirts, aided by the military supplies, guns, and transportation of the regularly constituted authorities, concentrated secretly, rode to given destinations and wrecked the Socialist and labor movement in villages or towns by destroying its newspapers, cooperative stores, headquarters and meeting-halls. Frequently they killed.

In America the first mention of Fascismo occurs on the 18th of October, 1920, when "armed radicals in black shirts" were reported attacking the offices of the newspaper Il Lavoratore in Trieste with bombs, hand grenades, and bludgeons; it was an item worthy of publication because it affected the lives of two American citizens. Twenty shots were fired at Joseph Emerson Haven, the American consul who had his office in the newspaper building, and Lincoln Eyre, the representative of the New York World.

Consul Haven sent an indignant report to the State Department, while even more indignant Mr. Eyre cabled that "this outrage is one of a long series committed by these bandits, these nationalist hoodlums, Fascisti as they call themselves, the word meaning 'nearly leaders' (sic) or perhaps with greater precision 'gangsters' who pretend to be inspired with patriotic devotion to Italian ideals. This sentiment translates itself in their strangely warped minds into systematic oppression by the most brutal and cowardly means, of all who venture to disagree with them. Militaristic nationalism is their creed and d'Annunzio (sic) is their prophet."

In November occurred the first large-scale military action of the newly armed illegal forces of the monarchy — the sack of Bologna — when the Socialist town council was driven out, the Chamber of Labor wrecked, the trades unions and cooperatives burned to the ground, the newspaper presses smashed and workingmen found on the premises beaten or murdered.

Between January and May, 1921, the Fascist squads destroyed 120 labor union headquarters and invaded 243 Socialist centers, killing 202 workingmen and wounding 1,144. In 1921 and 1922 they burned 500 labor centers and cooperatives and forcibly dissolved 900 Socialist municipalities. In almost all instances the military, the national and the local representatives of law and order, were confederates of the Black Shirts. For 162 Fascisti arrested in the first six months of 1921 the authorities jailed 2,240 workingmen. Of this period of violence Prezzolini, who at the time was neutral, wrote:

"They [the Fascisti] could organize themselves in armed camps and kill right and left, with the certainty of impunity and with the complicity of the police. It is thus no overstatement to recognize that the Fascists fought with 99 chances out of 100 of gaining the victory."

This guerilla warfare was waged chiefly against the cooperative movement, the labor unions, the Social Democrats, and the Catholics. It was not a war against Bolshevism, because whatever remained of Bolshevism after the 1920 factory-occupation episode was unimportant. Despite a million repetitions made since 1925, the year public relations counsel were engaged to help float Italian loans, it is a historic fact that there was no Bolshevik danger in Italy, and final proof can be found in the Popolo d'Italia of June 2, 1921, when Mussolini himself wrote:

"The Italy of 1921 is fundamentally different from that of 1919. ... To say that the Bolshevik danger still exists in Italy is equivalent of 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 the people."

Trains, which had not been running on time, improved their schedules. Strikes, which had been daily occurrences, became less frequent. Wages went up a bit. The cost of living went down. Exports and imports showed some satisfactory figures, and slowly Italy began lifting itself out of its despair. The best proof in the world is the rate of exchange. The dollar which had gone from 18 to 23 in 1920 came back to 20.15 for the first half of 1922.

Throughout Europe a rumor of optimism was spreading. For the first time since the war there was a small restoration of good feeling. In Italy the end of 1920 marking the liquidation of the insurrection of Fiume was followed by the famous January, 1921, Socialist Party congress in Leghorn which drove out the Communists, emancipating itself from a program of retaliatory violence and earning the support of organized labor throughout the world. Italy felt it was now convalescent from the wounds of the war and after-war.

With Bolshevism officially exiled and actually dying, there was now no reason for the continuance of the Fascist movement. But the price of the surrender of Fiume had been the semi-official recognition of the Black Shirts as collaborators of the forces of the State. Fascisti now carried arms openly. Meanwhile the country had grown so quiet that a general election was fought bloodlessly. It gave Italy a new parliament constituted as follows:

Democrats: 195
Socialists: 126
Catholics: 91
Nationalists: 40
Fascists: 32
Communists: 18

For the Communists it marked a significant defeat. The Fascisti, who in 1919 had fared so badly, got some satisfaction out of their 32 delegates in 1921, and the Popolari, organized in 1919, with 91 members, became a national force to be reckoned with in any future struggle for the maintenance of the middle road. Most important of all is the great victory of the Democrats and the moderate Socialists. The election showed the world that Italy was getting well politically and would remain a peaceful democratic constitutional nation.

It was at this moment that Mussolini, as usual without a platform, but with many promises to draw the sympathy of the masses whose psychology he knew so well, began his republican movement. But it did not go far. Immediately he played still another trick from his inexhaustible sleeve. To the astonishment of his followers, on the 23rd of July, 1921, he announced a proposed truce between the Fascist Party and militia and all of its enemies, also close cooperation between himself and the Socialist and Catholic Parties, both of which represented the working-classes.

In August this truce was signed "for the realization of the return of normal conditions" and for the renunciation of violence. The simple yet amazing text of this document, which, if made in good faith and capable of being carried out without opposition to Mussolini, would have changed the course of Italian history, is given in full in the Appendix. The signatories pledged themselves to end "all menaces, all reprisals, all punishments, all vengeances, all personal violence"; they were to respect the political insignias and economic organizations and to submit all violations to a college of arbitration, and to cooperate for the restoration of peace in the nation.

The treaty was signed by Mussolini, De Vecchi, and Giuriati for the parliamentary Fascist group, by Cesare Rossi and three others for the Fasci di Combattimento, by the Socialist Party, the Socialist parliamentary group, the General Federation of Labor, and by Enrico de Nicola, president of the Chamber of Deputies.

It may be noted that the first man to sign for the "Fighting Fascisti" was Cesare Rossi, he who was later to become head of the Cheka, carry out all orders against opposition leaders, finally to be implicated in the assassination which almost destroyed Fascism, a blow unforeseen by the disciple of Machiavelli.

With the ink hardly dry on the peace pact, Mussolini, who had, it must be truly admitted, initiated the conference, went to his desk and wrote the following declaration of reaffirmation and defiance to his own followers:

"I will defend with all my forces this treaty of peace which to my view attains the importance of a historic event on account of its 'singularity' without precedent.

"For this purpose I will attempt to apply the old and very wise proverb, 'Whoever does not employ the rod hates his son.' Well! If Fascism is my son — that which everyone has always known — I swear with the rods of my oath, of my courage, of my passion, I will either correct him or I will make his life impossible."

Can anyone doubt the courage, the passion, with which these words are written? Are they the expression of an honest man or can they possibly be those of the deepest hypocrite and villain? History alone can tell. Certain it was that in the August of 1921 the nation believed whole-heartedly that Mussolini with an outburst of frankness and honesty and fearlessness had done a great thing, had accomplished more than parliament and the polemics of the party press. This was the real peace of the people!

August passed in tranquility. But there were signs of trouble. All the forces of reaction, of private property, the bankers, the proprietors of the factories which had once been seized, the ship companies, the hotel keepers, and certain large landowners, who had once seen the menacing specter of Bolshevism, now determined that Socialism, liberalism, democracy, despite their legality, their pacifism, their disorganization, and their weaknesses, must also be banished. These elements were the employers of Mussolini the condottiere. On the other hand there were liberals of the same propertied classes who expressed their support of the Black Shirt leader orally.

With tremendous enthusiasm Mussolini, who again saw himself as a popular figure, attempted to curb the forces he had originated or encouraged. He thundered against the "hot heads," the "irresponsibles," the "violent elements," and he withdrew the radical pledges he had made. But it was useless. The times were out of joint for that sort of leadership. Tuscany, Emilia, and his own beloved Romagna refused to ratify the peace treaty.

Within the Fascist Party the movement against its duce grew in the cities and in the country. One of the most noteworthy breaches of the treaty occurred at Modena September 24th. The Po Valley Fascisti, who had refused all attempts at pacification, not only kept their squadristi on a war footing, but used their newly acquired guns to terrorize the Socialist cooperatives, the Catholic clubs, the labor organizations. The prefect of police of Modena had adopted measures to insure public order. The Fascisti protested this action. They marched into the public square opposite the prefecture and began their orations. Everyone who passed was forced, with clubs, to take off his hat during the speaking. The prefect, hearing the orators urge their followers to invade the police station, called for extra police, who, however, refused to obey the order.

Several excited persons rushed the commissaire of police and his men, striking about with clubs. Soon the whole Fascist group in excitement turned against the police, who, believing themselves in danger, fired into the crowd. There were seven dead and twenty wounded.

In the same month the Fascisti organized the assassination of the Deputy Di Vagno and the anti-French demonstrations of Venice.

In Bologna the Fascisti sang anti-Mussolini songs. During a meeting of the local committee practically everyone attacked the leader and soon printed signs appeared on the streets: "Who has betrayed once will betray again." It was ominous.

Old friends, leaders, founders of Fascism, deserted. Strangely enough, the one who stood steadfast was Cesare Rossi. Mussolini, seeing his followers in arms against him, said again: "If Fascism does not follow me, no one obliges me to follow Fascism. I am duce, a leader, a word which does not especially please me but which pleases others. We are numerous: schism is fatal. Let it come. The peace pact will have the reaction of precipitating the cleaning out of the party."

Bologna then voted against Mussolini.

Mussolini resigned. [1]

For a moment a great change came over Fascism. In all the industrial towns now and wherever there were large estates, the owners of land and factories became more active, disregarded Mussolini, organized their own clubs, rented headquarters, subsidized new branches about which Mussolini himself knew nothing. Among the more than 100,000 army officers that peace had thrown out of work many found employment in this new business. Arms were bought by the manufacturers and landowners; when military supplies arrived, it was the duty of the officers to drill and train and finally to lead the Fascist squadristi who were receiving money, guns, and orders from their new masters.

Thus it came about that Mussolini, seeing his life work disintegrating, himself disappearing as a national figure, reconsidered his resignation, and at the congress of the Fascisti in Rome, November, 1921, made a complete volte face again.

The pacifist of August who had sworn to whip Fascism into shape as a peaceful legal weapon, was himself whipped by Fascism. At the congress of Rome, Mussolini accepted the incorrigibility of his "son" and became Fascism's follower, not leader. He declared publicly that the peace treaty was dead and buried. Suddenly he announced himself for violence as a holy crusade against the Socialists and liberals. He even included the Catholics and Democrats in his speech demanding reprisals, renewal of bloodshed, supremacy of the Fascisti, and for the first time in history shouts of "Down with parliament," and, "Long live the dictatorship," were heard, shouts which were to lead within a year to just the event they presaged.

Thus passed another great crisis in the life of the child of Destiny. He had meant to conquer, had been conquered, and knew how to rise again even if his new leadership was for a cause, a program, an idea entirely opposed to the one for which he had a few weeks earlier announced himself prepared to risk his position, perhaps his life. The honest and sincere man of August who swore with "the rods of his courage and his passion" became in November an instrument for ruthlessness, violence, bloodshed — the program which the proprietors of Fascism demanded and which he humbly accepted, suddenly trying to make himself appear their leader again by being more extremist than the rest.

Mussolini was conquered by Fascism because more powerful forces had taken possession of his movement. In 1920 he had placed his forces at the disposal of certain industrialists without realizing that in saving them he would make them his masters.

Shortly after Mussolini's lieutenant (and later ambassador to the Vatican) De Vecchi had burned the Rome offices of the Avanti, he, a Torinese, was taken up by Com. de Benedetti and Aw. Ugo Gidogni of the Lega Industriale of Turin. Benni and Gino Olivetti, the directors of the Confederazione Generale dell'Industria, and Director Mazzini of the Associazione fra Industriali Metallurgici Meccanici ed Affini who was later to succeed de Benedetti as chairman of the Lega Industriale, were not only collaborating with Mussolini but with more trusted lieutenants who had less radical minds. These associations, corresponding to the various manufacturers' associations in America and the Stahlverein and other organizations which subsidized the Nazi movement in Germany, not only supplied the money for the Black Shirts, but succeeded easily in organizing the rebellion against Mussolini.

Whether or not he was previously aware of all the facts, he learned, at the Rome congress which ended the schism, that he could no longer defy the financial forces of which he was merely the political and military spearhead.

He now was given orders to destroy the labor movement. As the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and New York World wrote at the time, "the enemy was not, however, the Communists," because they were unimportant: the enemy was the federation of labor, social democracy, and the newly arisen Catholic party of workingmen and peasants who were led by a priest, Don Sturzo, and who were demanding agrarian reform, social justice, and a share in the wealth of the nation.

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Notes:

1. He wrote: "The nation turned to us when our movement appeared as a liberator from a tyranny; the nation will turn against us if our movement takes on the guise of a fresh tyranny. . . . The nation needs peace in order to recover, to restore itself, to fulfill its highest destinies. You do not understand, you do not wish to understand, that the country wishes to work without being disturbed. I would enter into an alliance at this moment with the devil himself, with Anti-Christ, if that would give this poor country five years of tranquillity, of restoration, of peace.

"From my point of view, the situation is absolutely clear: if Fascism will not follow me, no one can oblige me to follow Fascism. I understand and sympathize a little with those Fascisti who cannot get away from their own surroundings. ... I am a leader who leads, not a leader who follows. I go— now and above all— against the current and never abandon myself to it and I watch always, above all, for the changing winds to swell the sails of my destiny."

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CHAPTER 10: Priest versus Politician

AT ARGENTINA ALTABELLA REBELLIOUS PEASANTS, MARCHING behind a priest who held a crucifix above their heads, occupied the fields of the wealthy landowners in the name of Christ and Christian Communism. The soil, rich and poor, was equitably divided among workingmen who, like their ancestors for a thousand years, had tilled it and built up the fortunes of the landlords while they themselves slaved and hungered. To each man was given land according to his ability; from each was expected a contribution to the commonwealth according to his capacity.

"Avanti o popolo! Con fede franca
Bandiera bianca trionfera,"

sang the rebel peasants, substituting only one word for the common song of the Bolsheviki, the word "bianca" for "rosso" ("white" for "red"); the "white flag of Catholicism will triumph." Throughout the south of Italy and notably in Calabria the emancipation of the peasantry gained enormously. The masses "hailed Don Sturzo as an apostle, obeyed him as a dictator."

Thus, rudely, Italy's attention was called to a new force in its national life, the marching Partite Popolare Italiano, the party organized January 18, 1919, by the priest Don Luigi Sturzo for perpetuating the ideals of Christian democracy. This was his stirring proclamation:

"To all men free and strong, who, in this grave hour, feel the high duty of cooperation for the supreme ends of the Fatherland. . . .

". . . We uphold the political and moral program, the patrimony of the Christian people. . . .

". . . As the soul of the new society, the true sense of liberty responding to the civil maturity of our people and the highest development of its energies; religious liberty not only for the individual, but also for the Church, for the unfolding of her spiritual mission in the world; liberty of teaching without a state monopoly; liberty of class organization without preference or privilege for any party; communal and local liberties in accordance with the glorious Italian traditions."

The men who joined the Popolari were mostly peasants and urban members of the Azione Cattolica, so it became known as the Catholic Party, although it was no more affiliated with the Vatican than the Centrum in Germany and Catholic parties in many other nations. Significant, however, is the fact that the non expedit of February, 1868, which withdrew good Catholics from participation in elections, was canceled ten months after Don Sturzo organized his party.

The leader in every way, character, appearance, action, appeared to be the opposite of Mussolini. He was a man from the south, a pacifist, fanatic in his belief in human liberty, a radical social reformer like Savonarola, candid and frank and incapable of making compromises, and lacking entirely in the urge to self-advancement. He was truly the shepherd of his flock and his flock was all the poor and oppressed of the country. He loved them like brothers. Don Sturzo is an almost emaciated figure, the picture of asceticism, his gaunt eager passionate sincere face distinguished by a long narrow nose set between deep brown eyes which seem to be afire with his great idea of Christian brotherhood.

He was forty just after the war when he made his first political step by permitting his election as sindaco or mayor of his home town, Caltagirone, in Sicily. Here he collected a sum of money, bought 2,000 acres of land, divided it among the poorest, and demanded that the agrarian reform, promised for decades, be accomplished without violent seizure and illegal confiscation.

"Vogliamo le fabricke, vogliamo la terra,
Ma sensa guerra, ma sensa guerra,"

sang Sturzo's adherents at the time the workingmen had seized the factories. "We want the factories; we want the land; but without war," was their song and their policy. On the occasion of the railroad, telegraph and telephone strike, Mussolini urging the men to use violent methods, came face to face with Sturzo's party for the first time. Sturzo denounced the strike because of its violence, and helped the government to win.

In 1921, 1922, and 1923, as radicalism receded in Italy, the Catholic Party grew in strength in parliament and eventually replaced Social Democracy as the chief opponent of Fascism.

In these years Mussolini was still the anti-clerical of his exile in Switzerland. In his public speeches he ridiculed the Pope and made jokes about the size of Sturzo's nose. In April, 1921, he wrote: "Fascism is the strongest of all the heresies that strike at the doors of the churches. Tell the priests, who are more or less whimpering old maids: Away with these temples that are doomed to destruction; for our triumphant heresy is destined to illuminate all brains and hearts."

Don Sturzo, on the other hand, wrote of his chief opponent: "Of mediocre culture and meager political experience, Mussolini has the brilliant qualities of the extemporizer and none of the scruples of those who, convinced of an idea, fear to be false to it. . . . He can pass from theory to theory, from position to position, rapidly, even inconsistently, with neither remorse or regret. . . .

"Another quality which he possesses is his constant ability to seize the moment, to profit by circumstances. . . .

"His friends and companions he holds in esteem so long as they are useful to him; he fears them when he cannot do without them; he abandons them to their fate when they are in his way."

In February, 1922, Don Sturzo was the leader of the most powerful party in the Italian parliament. He was also a great influence in the Church. In the conclave for the election of a Pope in that month it was commonly said in Rome that "Don Sturzo might in one day name his Prime Minister and his Pope." But the priest had no such ambitions. Recounting the accomplishments of his party early in 1922, he summarizes them in this way:

1. Entry of the Catholic masses into political life after half a century of abstention.

2. Adoption of proportional representation in parliament.

3. Opposition to the Socialists, and to general political strikes.

4. Collaboration with the Liberals and Democratic-Liberals.

5. Brought question of freedom of schools to public and parliament.

6. Contribution to solution agricultural and economic problems.

7. Support of administrative decentralization.

8. Support of solutions of Yugoslav problem.

9. Early realisation of the Fascist peril and stand against armed violence.

On the debit side Don Sturzo wrote: strength wasted in com- promises with opposition and in collaboration with the government; lack of courage to take office when a crisis arose.

The political war of 1922 was over proportional representation. "Here," commented Don Sturzo, "was a source of friction between the old oligarchic currents and the new wave of democratic life. The latter was therefore labeled demagogy, or even, with the Russian term, Bolshevism and much was written against the Red Bolshevism of the Socialists and the White Bolshevism of the Popolari, and against their possible union.

"Therefore both Democratic Liberals and industrialists and agrarians turned to Fascism as the force that could save them. Thus was invented the fable that Fascism in 1922 saved Italy from Bolshevism. There was no peril of Bolshevism in Italy nor did Fascism save her from it. If by Bolshevism is meant the agitations and disorders of 1919-20, up till the occupation of the factories, these were already past history, and the general elections of May, 1921, were evidence of the state of mind of the country and of its constitutional normality.

"There does not exist in Italian political life a more insincere phenomenon than the fear of Bolshevism on the part of the wealthy class in 1922; the latter had taken the offensive against the State by the Fascist acts of violence, and had to justify both offensive and violence: this they could only do by crying out that there was peril of a Bolshevization of Italy in the near future."

In 1922 the Fascist squads attacked Catholic institutions with the same enthusiasm with which they wrecked labor unions and cooperatives. The squadristi of Fascism stormed Catholic institutions and murdered more than one parish priest, but the Catholic leader insisted that violence should not be answered with violence.

To conclude the tragic story of Don Sturzo it is necessary here to disregard the chronology of the history of Fascism and its Duce. In April, 1923, when clubs and headquarters of the Popolari again were being looted and wrecked and burned, the party held its fourth congress in Turin where it reaffirmed "its will to continue the fundamental battle for Liberty and against any centralizing perversion in the name of the pantheistic State or deified nation"; it asserted its "solidarity with those who suffer for the idea and for internal peace, and invokes for the welfare of Italy respect for human personality and the spirit of Christian brotherhood." The party decided to remain independent, to protect individual liberty in Italy, to defend religion and the church.

Shortly afterwards Mussolini proposed a new election law. The "reform" as he so brilliantly called it, would give the party which obtained 25 per cent of the total votes cast 66-2/3 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, while the remaining 33-1/3 per cent would be divided among all other parties proportionately, thus making it possible for the Fascist minority to rule the anti-Fascist majority "legally."

Into the final struggle Don Sturzo put all his force; while other parties still proclaimed liberty, his was the only one which dared, in the face of Black Shirts armed with rifles, bludgeons, and castor oil, openly to resist. But his was passive resistance and his weapon chiefly an appeal to reason and Christian morals.

His followers in hot-headed Calabria got out of control. For every Catholic institution attacked they attacked a Fascist institution, and in Naples and less important centers the Catholics found that the employment of retaliatory violence was the one and only way to victory. They beat Fascismo at its own game.

It was at this moment that Mussolini's envoys went to the Vatican with a message which was also a threat. The attention of the Pope was called to the fact that St. Peter's and the Vatican were surrounded by Fascist bayonets and yet had not suffered harm. Unless pressure was brought against Don Sturzo the Catholic churches and the Catholic religion would suffer great harm.

On the 9th of June, 1923, Don Sturzo sent his resignation to the Pope, and on the 10th he departed for the monastery of Montecassino and retirement. Some time later, unsure of his safety, he went to London, where he is living today, "recommended by Fascist newspapers to the special attention of any assassin who happens to be idle in England," according to Professor Gilbert Murray, who befriended him.

That the Pope and the Catholic Church have been threatened with attack by Mussolini was admitted more recently when Don Sturzo wrote that "at the critical moment the man who was believed by the Fascisti and philo-Fascisti alike to be the pivot of the situation, the convinced adversary of Mussolini [meaning himself], left the leadership of his party because of obscure Fascist threats of armed reprisals against the Church. . . ."

In this way the last and most important political party to dispute Mussolini's claim to dictatorship was eliminated from public life. The epitaph was written by Don Sturzo: "Fascismo came forward as an anti-constitutional and revolutionary movement based on violence and direct action. Popolarismo was law-abiding, constitutional, and moral. Fascismo considers itself as the absolute and sole manifestation of political life. Popolarismo looks on itself as a political party with rights and duties like any other party functioning in the plane of the modern state. Fascismo is against liberty, against democracy, against the parliamentary State. Popolarismo is for liberty, for democracy, for the parliamentary State. Fascismo upholds the nationalist, plutocratic and imperialist State. Popolarismo upholds free trade, international cooperation and peace. . . .

"The Popolari arose in the name of liberty. In the administrative and educational, in the social and religious, fields they fought for liberty in the teeth of the Democrats, the Liberals and the Socialists ... for liberty, based on the rights of human personality, is unalienable and cannot be surrendered for any material prosperity or alleged national right. . . ."

The unarmed prophet had failed, and the armed prophet again had won, as Machiavelli had informed Mussolini in his exile years.

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Part 2: THE CONQUEST OF POWER

CHAPTER 11: The Glorious March on Rome

AFTER THE BATTLE OF ARQUES, WHICH WAS FOUGHT THROUGH September and October of the year 1589, Henry, King of France, wrote to the Duke of Crillon: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we have conquered at Arques and you were not there."

Just three hundred and thirty-three years later, almost to a day, occurred another great event, the glorious Fascist march on Rome, which has now become in the black-shirted minds of Italy the noblest victory in all its history. Only a few years past, and in the memory of most men now living, this episode has become a marvelous myth. National hymns, popular songs, millions of photographs, hundreds of paintings, new sagas, and at least one made-to-order epic tell us how Mussolini led the Fascisti into Rome and conquered Bolshevism.

The books of history are being rewritten. In Russia, Trotsky, the hero of the Bolshevik revolution, the military genius of the war with Poland, becomes in a decade a minor figure of no importance if not an actual villain, while in Germany a similar decade is wiped from the public mind to leave room for the inscription of the record of a new man. And so it has been done in Italy.

But if history has any value for the people who are its inheritors, it is indeed a simple task to right the record of which we ourselves are the witnesses and at times the participants. Was Trotsky a nobody? Are a dozen years of the German Republic to be regarded solely as the story of Hitler's rise? Did Mussolini really slay the Red Dragon, and was he even present at the Arques of 1922?

That year opened for the European world with another of its supplementary conferences which, despite a denial to Russia's claim to participation and America's refusal to do so, was hopeful of accomplishing something in righting the wrongs of the Versailles congress. Here in Cannes, on the French Riviera, hundreds of journalists of many lands were almost as important as the diplomats of the great nations.

Here Benito Mussolini came as the representative of his own newspaper. But neither he nor Fascism were at the time interesting enough to warrant attention from the American, British, or other noted journalists who had accompanied Lloyd George and Briand and the premiers of Belgium and Italy and Czechoslovakia and the sensational delegation from Germany under Walther Rathenau.

Among the Italians, however, Mussolini had an imposing reputation. The press conferences which the diplomats of this country held were marked by Mussolini's violent outbursts of oratory which would divide the assembly into hostile camps, the majority shouting the disturber into silence.

Notable among Italy's journalistic representatives was Pietro Nenni, Mussolini's successor as editor of the Avanti. The two had not only worked together but, it will be remembered, during the anti-Tripoli war demonstration in Forli had spent nights in the same prison jointly cursing the government which had placed them there.

They were friends; they could talk with extreme frankness, and this is their conversation during a walk on the seashore as Nenni records it:

Mussolini: Civil war has become a tragic menace. I do not fear the responsibility. The kindliness of the State forces the formation of a party to smash the Bolshevik menace, reestablish authority, save the victory.

Nenni: To the class of which you have become the instrument, the right of the workingmen to organize themselves for the defense of their social interest and for the conquest of power, that is now called Bolshevism. The police personifies authority and as for victory it is conceived only as a form for the survival of the military spirit over the civil spirit.

Mussolini: I know everything about the sentiments of the class about which you speak. I am not their instrument. At a given hour I have not hesitated to proclaim that one must escape from the bloody circle of violence.

Nenni: Your individualism always strays. I do not care what you have become. I am certain that lacking a sentiment of justice, everything that you will do will be marked with the red iron of arbitrariness. The peace which you offer from time to time to my friends is for them a renunciation of their ideal. At that price the bourgeoisie is always ready to act. Moreover, you forget many things.

Mussolini: What?

Nenni: You forget the dead; you forget that you were the chief of the Socialist Party; you forget perhaps the workingmen fallen under the clubs and the stilettos of the Black Shirts.

Mussolini: There must be no sentimentalism in life. I know that the dead hang heavily. I frequently think about my past with a profound melancholy. But it is more than a few dozen deaths in a civil war. There were hundreds of thousands dead in the war. We must also defend them.

Nenni: The proletariat against whom you now direct your offensive, defends the dead by fighting against war and against militarism. Frequently they are mistaken in details, but they never mistake their ideal.

Mussolini: Your friends must understand. I am as ready for war as for peace.

Nenni: You have lost the possibility of choosing.

Mussolini: In that case, it will be war.

Nenni: For the past two years it has been war.

This dialogue occurred just eight months before the guerilla warfare which Fascism had been waging throughout Italy, was ordered turned into a civil war by Mussolini at the national congress which the party held in Naples in October.

"All armed prophets have conquered and the unarmed have been destroyed," Mussolini had read and underlined in his Machiavelli. He had no intention of marching on Rome with the few bayonets of his own illegal Fascisti. He was not that foolish.

To take over the Italian government required not only the leadership of the Fascist squadristi, but the violation of the oath of fidelity to the crown on the part of many generals in the regular army, because it is quite evident that a regiment or two with their usual rifles, a few hand grenades, and machine guns, not to mention some gas bombs or perhaps one battery of three-inch guns firing shrapnel, could have, in five minutes, made of the "march on Rome" what the cautious Mussolini, safe in Milan, feared it would be, a bloody fiasco. But not a regular soldier moved. The scheming Duke of Aosta, cousin of Victor Emmanuel III, was another important part of the Fascist plot. He was a man of great ambition who believed himself the most capable of the House of Savoy to rule the country. He had great influence in the army. It was one of his followers. General Vaccari, who succeeded General Badoglio as chief of staff after the latter, who under Giolitti's regime had armed the Fascisti, had resigned. It was Badoglio who had from time to time made the declaration that the Fascisti were not to be feared by the King because he would destroy their pretensions with one regiment in a few hours.

While the Fascisti were holding their congress in Naples, on October 24th, a secret conference was being held in Florence, where Black Shirt leaders, chiefs of the regular army, representatives of the nationalists and the imperialists in parliament and a representative of the Duke of Aosta, decided that the time had come to take over the Facta government. Even at this late date the man chosen as representative of the "New Italy" was not Mussolini, but the man of heroics, Gabriele d'Annunzio. But the poet refused. The second choice was not Mussolini, but General Peppino Garibaldi, who had led an Italian legion on the French front from the first days of the war. Garibaldi refused. Then it was that Mussolini was chosen, and that the Duke of Aosta's intervention with the army was promised on the basis of his receiving the regentship.

The Duke went to Spoleto and put new oil into his motor-car, filled up the gasoline-tank, and waited the word to ride into Rome and take his cousin's throne.

Mussolini, on the 24th, made his big speech to the congress at Naples. It was a thundering speech. The time had come. The country had had enough. It must be saved despite itself. But from what? From Bolshevism? From Communism? There is no mention of these terrible forces. Mussolini had thundered against them in 1920. Now Jove was sending his thunderbolts against — Democracy.

Under that vague term the following forces were joined: the several liberal parties, including the Catholics, Socialists, and Republicans (but not the Communists who had split from the Socialists and drifted weakly away); the labor unions with some 2,000,000 members; and the cooperatives which, despite Fascist fire and sword, were flourishing remarkably in city and country.

The nation in 1922 had recovered from the economic and political chaos of 1920. When, some time later, the distinguished journalist, Hiram Kelly Motherwell, had charts and graphs prepared of the standard of living, exports and imports, rate of exchange, wages, unemployment, etc., from figures officially supplied by the Fascist government, these showed without exception that every line going up or down, all favorable to Italy, had the crucial favorable angle sometime between the end of 1921 and the first months of 1922.

Even the wartime national budget, which caused deficits of scores of billions of lire in the first post-bellum years, was now about to balance. In fact, the deficit which the liberal premiers cut down to about half a billion was to be replaced, thanks to the program of economy outlined, with a flattering surplus.

So much for facts and figures. But the effects of these changes were as far reaching. If, as figures prove, the standard of living of the Italian masses had gone up, if wages had gone up, if the cooperatives were flourishing, it is evident that some one had to pay for all these magnificent national achievements. These wages had been won by that series of strikes which so disgusted American tourists and bankers; but they disgusted even more the Italian employers who were forced by this demonstration of power and solidarity among the workingmen to disgorge some of their war profits. Wages increased and the chambers of commerce, the association of metal factory owners, the national industrial associations, the industrial banks and the employers' organizations which were sorely hit in their financial plexus, and whose thousands of newspapers could no longer raise the shout of "Bolshevism" because this red herring was now a dead herring, turned in their last extremity to the use of violence to alter an economic situation.

The cooperatives were destroying private profits. Therefore the cooperatives must be destroyed. The labor unions were becoming arrogant. Therefore the unions must go. The liberal-socialistic regime in Rome was nothing but a school of gossips....

It was to the financial interest of the big-business men of the north to encourage the squadristi to plunder and destroy the cooperatives, the labor unions, the Socialist, and the Catholic institutions. But for the condottiere of the squadristi, Mussolini, it was the weak bombastic parliamentary system which became the objective of attack.

Italy was recovering. In a little while, perhaps only a few months, it would be too late to act. In August armed Fascist bands indulged in a general campaign of terror in the large cities, and the labor unions, demanding that the government use armed force to smash Fascism, called a general strike. This labor union strike, which had not one glint of red in its spectrum, was a miserable failure. Times were so much better, progress was so rapid, that few heeded the call to protest.

It was then that opportunity, which had knocked at Mussolini's door with the noise of cannon in 1914, and practically smashed in his door in 1919, again visited him. That same Will to Power of which he spoke daily, that same "star of destiny" which he says guided him always, informed him that unless he made his bid immediately the situation would be forever changed and locked against him.

"I take a solemn oath," roared Mussolini, "that either the government of the country must be given peacefully to the Fascisti or we will take it by force."

Again, as at Reggio Emilia and in the Socialist congress of Milan, the violent enthusiasm of the speaker communicated itself to the mass.

"A Roma! A Roma!" the Black Shirts shouted, hysterically.

And again Mussolini became the master.

He had, as is well known, had no intention of marching on Rome in October, 1922. He did not know at first, as did d'Annunzio and later Garibaldi, that the military forces were conspiring for a coup d'etat and needed a leader. Although the Naples congress was intended by him to be a test of his power, it surprised him by its readiness to risk a civil war.

On the 19th of the month he had written to his good friend De Santo, Italian, Fascist, and Rome correspondent of the Chicago Tribune — in fact the predecessor of the present writer — the following letter:

Caro De Santo:

I thank you for your many kindnesses in presenting the Fascist cause to America. I regret deeply that the American ambassador, Signor Washburn-Child, does not seem very sympathetic to Fascismo and I would esteem it greatly if you would take me and introduce me to him.

I am going to Naples in a few days. I do not think that anything of consequence will occur there, and on my way back to Milan I will stop in Rome, and hope you will make the appointment for me.

Cordially,

Mussolini

But instead of stopping in Rome to see the American ambassador, Richard Washburn Child, Mussolini went from the Naples congress directly to Milan to lead his "revolution."

The secret of this action was a series of telegrams from Florence, where the military heads who planned the overthrow had made Mussolini their third choice. Among the generals who had betrayed their oath to the King and the royal constitution were De Bono, Fara, Magiotto, Zamboni, and Tiby. And when they had been informed from Naples that Mussolini had accepted leadership they sent him the following telegram:

Venite. La pappa e pronta. Le mense sono imbandite. Non avrete che a sedervi a tavola.

(Come. The gruel is ready. The dinner is served. You have only to seat yourself at the table.)

Thus revolution began.

On the 26th the Fascisti had sent an ultimatum to the government demanding the premiership for their party. Facta, the Prime Minister, replied by handing his resignation to the King. On the 27th Mussolini went back to his newspaper office in Milan and the Fascist squadristi got their orders to move.

Under the command of many generals, they "marched" on Rome in three columns. From Umbria, Romagna, and Tuscany the Black Shirts came to Foligno, where General Fara took command and led them to Monterotondo, north of Rome. The men from d'Annunzio's Abruzzi assembled at Tivoli, under Bottai. Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and western seaboard cities and towns, north and south, sent delegations to meet at Santa Marinella, and as their open trucks went slowly along the dusty roads the Fascist civilians praised the adventure as friendly, while opponents said simply it was child's play.

But when the concentration began the city of Rome was alarmed and the garrison was put to work stringing wartime barbed wire around some of the gates. On the morning of the 28th the general staff officers had reports there were no more than 8,000 Fascists in the neighborhood of Rome, scattered, ill-clad, and ill-fed and listless. Premier Facta, who could have sent a few machine-guns against them, or who could merely have surrounded them and starved them into jail or dissolution, did what was typically in the character of the parliament of that day and in himself — he did nothing but run around excitedly, talking, gesturing.

The King had returned from Pisa on the evening of the 27th. Angry with the cabinet and particularly with the weakness of Facta, he threatened, "Before I'll give in to them I'll take my wife and children and leave." However, the King agreed to declare martial law. Facta drew up the proclamation. Certain of the King's promise, he informed the prefects everywhere to take the necessary measures to crush Fascism.

Meanwhile the Fascisti who were not "marching" were "storming" the public buildings of doubtful cities, occupying and holding the railroad stations, post offices, telegraph offices, armories, all upon the invitation of the authorities.

Facta arrived early on the morning of the 28th with the decree of martial law. The King weakened. It might cause revolutionary bloodshed. Facta, who had a consummate will to surrender, was caught in the emotions of the King and did not insist. But when Facta tried to spread the emotional contagion to the cabinet, it stood firm, and at a few minutes after ten that morning the official news agency announced to the papers that the King had declared martial law.

With this fait accompli, Facta ran back to the King, who now firmly refused to sign. While Facta had been trembling, the King had been acting. He had received members of the Nationalist Party, and other imperialists, who made two declarations, one of which was untrue and the other doubtful: they told the King that the Duke of Aosta was among the Fascisti outside the walls of Rome, and that he had 80,000 men ready to seize the crown, and that the army had refused to fight against the Fascisti. The King was frightened. He believed. He surrendered.

At noon the decree of martial law was declared null. The King telegraphed to Mussolini in Milan to come form a government.

With shouts of joy men who had been scared put on black shirts and, jumping into railroad trains, refused to buy tickets, but shouted "To Rome! To Rome!" so that by the 31st of October about 20,000 were assembled outside the walls of the Eternal City.

But where was our hero all this time? He was at the head of the revolution. While the Black Shirts were riding in crowded railroad coaches, much to the indignation of American tourists, and commandeering trucks and even peasant carts, Mussolini spent anxious moments waiting for reports from headquarters which the generals had established in Perugia.

One of the generals, Mussolini relates proudly, then appeared in Milan with the news that the "offensive" was proceeding excellently and that there would be no opposition from the Royal army or in fact from any of the forces of law and order. "We know from very faithful unforgettable friends," he repeated, "that the army, unless exceptional circumstances arise, will maintain itself on the ground of amiable neutrality." There was no other organized armed force in Italy. The liberals and the radicals had no weapons.

But the leader knew that there must be bloodshed to have a revolution. Somehow or other there must be the blood bath Mussolini had asked first for the proletariat, now for the Fascisti, if the thing were to be done properly, successfully, and impressively. But not one report that came in of all the street cars occupied and all the railroad coaches filled with "marching" Black Shirts, spoke of anybody getting killed.

Well, if there was going to be no revolution in the open countryside, perhaps there would be one in Rome or Milan.

"To the barricades! On to the barricades!" shouted the future Duce, but there being nobody making an attack, and no barricades anywhere to defend, he proposed building them around the Popolo office in Milan.

Soon the whole staff, including the women, were busy. Boxes, wood, the little carts which had been used for distributing the paper, trash of every description, were piled into the street, the silent unrevolutionary street, and the barricades arose as in once glorious Paris.

"I put on the black shirt. I barricaded the Popolo d'Italia. In the livid and grey morning, Milan had a new and fantastic appearance. Pauses and sudden silences gave one the sensation of great hours that come and go in the course of history. Frowning battalions of royal guards scouted the city and the monotonous rhythm of their feet sounded ominous echoes in the almost deserted streets."

Almost deserted. The police kept away. The enemy kept far away. Only the Fascist! were busy running about, building up, moving around, shouting instructions, warnings, greetings, getting their guns ready, peering about for trace or smell of an enemy. The barricades were beehives and bedlam, but on the other side there was nothing but sunshine and dead quiet, dead sunshine and pale quiet. Mussolini had protected his offices "with everything needful for defense." He knew that "if the government authorities desired to give a proof of their strength they would have directed their first violent assault at the Popolo d'Italia." One morning he looked out and saw machine-guns pointed at him.

"I had my rifle charged and went down to defend the doors. The neighbors had barricaded entrances and windows and were begging for protection. During the firing bullets whistled around my ears," reports Mussolini.

The bullets that whistled so melodramatically around the heroic ears of "the Duce who precedes" came from behind. All the confusion, all the hurly-burly of a revolution, was behind the barricades. All the shooting was there, too. The entire personnel of the newspaper, including the editors, among them Signora Sarfatti, the devoted, the hero-worshiping one, were behind the barricades making a noise of revolution. It was midday of the 28th of October when the first firing was heard, when Mussolini, according to the eyewitness lady editor, seized his rifle and rushed down to the barricade: "At that moment he ran the greatest risk of his life. One of the young men who followed behind him, seeing him mount the barricade, leveled his rifle in the direction of the enemy and fired, the bullet grazing the head of the Chief and whistling through his hair just above his ear."

A frightened Mussolini did not at first know whether the bullet which "whistled around my ears" came from the enemy or from one of his ardent followers. That shooting, the most memorable of the Fascist revolution, which almost caused the death of its leader-in-chief, resulted in a terrific uproar behind the barricade. With savage anger the staff of the Popolo threw itself upon the unfortunate Fascist who had fired with good intention and bad aim. It was bent on a lynching. For a minute it did look as if there was to be some blood in this revolution, after all, as if there was actually to be blood upon a revolutionary barricade.

But Mussolini himself said, No.

He stepped down from the barricade, rubbing his head. He mixed into the fray, shouting down the would-be lynchers, extricating his zealous follower and pacifying the others. There was no more shooting.

At midday on the 29th the telephone rang and Mussolini was offered the place of Prime Minister of Italy. He had conquered.

The last attempt to keep him from his goal of power was made by some politicians. Just after the horrible episode on the barricades, the royal guard had made a peaceful arrangement, a truce, which provided for the removal of the machine-guns. "With that sort of armistice began for me the day of October 28th." That night the politicians proposed a truce and armistice with the government itself. Salandra, a nationalist, one time premier, would take the job again and conduct Italian policies more to the liking of the Fascisti. Mussolini replied:

"War is declared. We will carry it to the bitter end. The struggle is blazing all over Italy. Youth is in arms. I am rated as a leader who precedes and not one who follows. I will not humiliate with arbitration this page of the resurrection of Italian youth. I tell you it is the last chapter. It will fulfill the traditions of our country. It cannot die in compromise."

Then came the telephone call. Guido Barella, of the Secolo, and also correspondent for my newspaper in Milan, thus vividly describes the scene in the office that afternoon. Mussolini still had the receiver to his ear. About him was grouped the staff of the paper.

"I will come to Rome," he replied without a tremor in his voice, "when the charge to form a Ministry is official." He hung up.

He stood still a second, his expression serene, his eyes far away. Then:

"My Ministry . . . !" — a hard dry sound like a sob was in his voice. "My Ministry will be thus ...;" half closing his eyes contemplatively, he added:

"If they will not accept my proposition and allow me to put in the men I consider suitable for office, then I will have a Ministry that is entirely Fascist, from the president to the last office boy."

That evening he was still at his post in the newspaper office, a gray raincoat over the black shirt and uniform, a soft grey hat, as usual, down over his eyes.

More telephoning, more excitement, and we are only a few hours before his departure for Rome, in answer to a confirmatory telegram received from the King's aide-de-camp:

His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel begs you to come to Rome at once. He wishes to offer you the task of forming a new ministry. General Cittadini.

(Such was the lamentable state of communications of the execrable Facta regime that the urgent message from the King had taken hours to reach Mussolini, who had not trusted the telephone and who had remained torn between doubt and hope and wonder.)

Notified by telegrams and telephone messages, the legionaries cheered and shouted:

"To Rome! To Rome!"

Time seemed to pass with uncanny swiftness. Of a sudden Mussolini was running down the stairs and had disappeared in a waiting car.

Thousands of people had gathered in and about the station, as he slowly passed through the throng, alone, in his gray raincoat, hands deep in his pockets, his hat down over his eyes; the shouting and applause increased until it was a mad delirium.

He was pale, paler than usual.

Flowers were showered upon him as, tranquil and serene, he slowly advanced through the dense crowd to the platform and the train.

He arrived at the steps of the special car reserved for him. The presidential train was on its way to Rome. The son of the blacksmith had become the Dues, and he was going forth to his unending fight.

Just before he left for the station, Mussolini turned over the barricaded Popolo to his brother Arnaldo. He then "asked the assistance of God." Still earlier in the day he had gone to the Fascist main barracks, where he met his faithful friend and henchman, Cesare Rossi, and told him the "boys" could now go ahead and burn down his old enemy newspaper, the Avanti. "I was in a terrible state of nervous tension. Night after night I had been kept awake, giving orders, following the compact columns of the Fascisti, restricting the battle to the knightly practices of Fascism."

As the train took him to Rome and power, the Avanti went up in flames, the first knightly act of victorious Fascism.

The Duke of Aosta was kept waiting at Spoleto. He had been used as a pawn, and now he was forgotten.

The Vatican had remained neutral but fearful. It knew that the young atheist of Lausanne was coming into power and anything might happen to the Church — bloodshed, fire, annihilation. The Pope sent emissaries to General De Vecchi, member of the quadrumvirate, and to Dino Grandi, one of the ruthless politicians who had become a power in the north. De Vecchi and Grandi sent back word that the Catholic Church had nothing to fear, that, on the other hand, Mussolini had realized the necessity of having the cooperation of the Vatican in order to establish a successful regime in a country almost wholly Catholic. Mussolini gave orders to respect the Church and its property.

The Fascisti piled out of their trucks, street cars, and trains and occupied Monterotondo, not far from Rome. Mussolini speaks of 100,000, but other reports say there were but 8,000 of them. Both may be right. Only a few Black Shirts came to Monterotondo, yet when the triumphal parade was reviewed by Mussolini several days later, their number had swelled to many tens of thousands.

Mussolini, some time afterwards, in one of his speeches, when he had worked himself up into a fury, mentioned "three thousand dead" as the cost of the glorious victory, but James Murphy of the British diplomatic service, and Carlton Beals, the author, who were both in Rome reporting, say there were no dead. Murphy speaks of one boy who succumbed to fatigue as the full casualty list. It is most likely that Mussolini was thinking of the Fascist claims that they had lost several thousand members in all the years of street fighting from the time of first organization until the glorious March on Rome.

As his train approached the Eternal City, Mussolini got out his black shirt and put it on. The fog lay thin and cold over the land and the thin notes of a military cornet announced the arrival of il duce che precede (the leader who precedes) at Civita Vecchia. Thousands sang Giovinezza as the engine groaned its last.

"Where is he," shouted the frenzied multitude.

Pale, "his large eyes reflecting a soul on fire," he stood in the last car, "silently surveying the mob." In the raising of his hand for silence "there was a feeling of history."

"The Naples Congress," he said, "has its logical conclusion in the irresistible march on Rome. Friends, his majesty the King has called me to Rome to form a government. I will form it. But I demand calm, order, discipline. It is necessary that nothing corrupts my victory. "Princes, Triaires, Fascists! Our movement is victorious. We have conquered without firing a shot because Fascism has been more than ever stirring to the depths the strict and generous interpreter of the national conscience.

"Italy is in your hands, and we swear to place it on the road of its ancient glory.

"Viva Fascismo! Viva I'Italia!"

The crowd: "For Benito Mussolini. Ayah, ayah, ayah. Alala!"

Fascists, officers, regular soldiers, station hands, women and children cheered.

Mussolini got off the train, motored to the Quirinal in his black shirt, was introduced "without formalities" to the King. "I beg your Majesty to forgive me for appearing in your presence in uniform," he said after kissing the royal hand. "I have just come from a bloodless battle which had to be fought." The King smiled. The next day some twenty thousand Fascisti who had arrived by train, truck, and horse-carriage, and the many thousands who had arrived after the "capture," were reviewed by Premier Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel together.

The photographs of this event to this very day are labeled "Mussolini leading the March on Rome." But like the Duke of Crillon at Arques, the Duce of Fascismo had not been there.

There was no revolution. No blood was shed. It was a military conspiracy [1] to which the generals and the government were party and the industrialists in the north the financial backers. Nevertheless, it was a great victory for the student of Machiavelli. "I was triumphant in Rome," he wrote, triumphantly.

_______________

Notes:

1. On September 29th, writes the historian Salvemini, the Fascisti had been assured that the army would remain neutral. "This essential fact was divulged by Alessandro Chiavolini, Mussolini's private secretary, in the Popolo d'Italia for October 27, 1923. Mussolini himself in a speech on October 30, 1923, declared that he knew that 'at the opportune moment the government machine guns would not fire on the revolutionaries.'" Richard Washburn Child, the American ambassador, wrote that he had it on good authority that the army secretly favored the movement.

Two weeks before the coup d'etat Mussolini, replying to General Badoglio's exclamation, "At the first fire, all of Fascism will collapse," said, "General Badoglio fools himself. . . . The national army will not go against the army of the Black Shirts. . . ." (Beals, Rome or Death, page 264.)

Wilbur Forrest, correspondent in Rome and now editor of the New York Herald Tribune, was at Civitavecchia during the "march." The commanding regular army general informed him he had received orders from Rome not to fire on the Fascisti but to place the railroads and other transportation at their disposal. Forrest was given a truck; a dozen Fascisti barged in, and so the American journalist also led the march on Rome.

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CHAPTER 12: The Victor in Search of a Program

THE FIRST FASCIST DICTATORSHIP WAS ESTABLISHED WITHOUT the loss of a drop of blood. It was a sort of palace revolution, a conspiracy within the army — whole regiments wore the black shirts under their uniforms — at first a mere change in premiership brought about through armed intimidation instead of a plebescite at the polls.

But a frightened Europe pounded on Mussolini's door, demanding whether he intended to suppress the labor unions; whether he would respect Italy's obligations to the Allies; if his policy was peace or war; and if he would pay the debts to the United States.

Much to everyone's surprise. Premier Mussolini announced the formation of the conventional parliamentary coalition government. Immediately the world breathed regularly again. Then, being a professional journalist and knowing that the press made and unmade all the political beds in Europe, the Premier, whose first act had been to proclaim a censorship, issued the following statement: "When conditions are settled I will restore liberty of the press, but the press must prove itself worthy of liberty. Liberty is not only a right, it is a duty."

To the Allies he said: "France is dissatisfied with the peace and she is right. It is a bad peace. The war was not pushed to its natural conclusion. We should have finished it, you at Berlin, we at Vienna and Budapest. It is necessary to take the enemy by the throat. You have little chance of getting what is owed you. You were deceived. Germany has the will not to pay. She is dangerous."

To the masses he said: "The Fascist movement which began as bourgeois, now has become syndicalist, but of national syndicalism, taking into account the interest of workingmen and those of employers and producers. Please emphasize we are not anti-proletariat."

To the American journalists he gave a special session in the Hotel Savoia: "Nothing but good can be said about the United States. One always speaks well of his creditor — and we all owe the United States money."

The great day of the new parliament came. In his hand Mussolini held the scepter of semi-legal power. As all the trains out of Rome carried the Black Shirt army which had not fired a shot in its victory nor enjoyed the delirium of a revolution, back to its homes, the new Prime Minister stood at the head of a government in just the same relation as his predecessors, the "cowards," "traitors," "incompetents," and "gossips" whom he had denounced. The cabinet was a coalition, continuing many democratic and liberal elements and policies. There was no dictatorship, only a faint rattling of a sword.

"Gentlemen," the new Premier said on his first day in parliament, "that which I have done today, in this room is a formal act of deference towards you for which I do not ask any testimony or particular recognition.

"A revolution has its rights. I am here to defend and to strengthen to the highest degree the revolution of the Black Shirts in introducing profoundly, like a force of evolution, progress and equilibrium in the history of the nation. [Applause, Right.]

"I could abuse my victory, but I refuse to. I am imposing limits. With my three hundred thousand young men, armed in every way, decided for anything, and so to speak mystically ready to carry out my orders, I could chastise all those who have defamed and at- tempted to throw Fascism into the mud.

"I could make of this hall, low and gray, a bivouac of corpses. ..."

Applause interrupted from the Right benches, where sat all the new parliamentarians who had won their seats by knife and gun. Murmurs of discontent from the Center. Protests shouted from the Left. "Long live parliament. Long live parliament," cried Modigliani to the cheers of his followers. The speaker's face grew darker.

"I could close this parliament and establish a government composed exclusively of Fascists. I could do it, but I have not willed it; at least not for the present moment."

The Right benches remained silent, but the tumult of the Center and Left increased.

"My adversaries have remained in their hiding-places; some have tranquilly come out and obtained free circulation, profiting thereby already by spitting their venom and by attempting their ambushes.

"I have established a coalition government, not with the intention of obtaining a majority in parliament, which today I can very well dispense with [Applause, extreme Right], but to unite — to aid this suffering nation — all of the shades and parties who would save the nation.

"Before arriving here we were asked what was our program. Alas! it is not programs which are lacking in Italy; it is men and the will to apply the programs. All the problems of life in Italy, all, I say, have already been solved on paper, but the will to translate them into facts is missing. The government, today, represents this will, firm and resolved."

But within a few days the old parliamentary game began. Having arrived in power without a program— the ragged ends of several old and frequently changed programs having proved inadequate — and unable to produce anything new except such words as "discipline" and "work" and "patriotism," the new Premier found himself the object of attack of all the Opposition and the neutral. The great newspapers kept asking him for a program, and the humorous weeklies made him ridiculous, A dog doctor had a big sign painted over his clinic with an English bull in the center, a growling likeness of Mussolini, who, as a punster later put it, "hounded" the veterinarian out of town. A leading comic sheet published a series of articles on a modern, humorless, impotent, bellicose, weak, threatening, vacillating, furious, unvictorious Napoleon. In Turin a journalist, Gobetti, launched irony and sarcasm upon the theatrical conqueror. The entire independent as well as the liberal and opposition press, still untouched by draconic suppression, joined in exposing the falsity of claims, the failure of action, the lack of definite aims, the foolishness and fatuity and frustration of the new regime and its blundering leader. The Fascist honeymoon was over and again disillusion gripped the nation.

Fascism had come into power. It was powerless. So long as legality remained, it was still possible to overthrow the government by a vote; if the Black Shirt militia were to be mobilized again, it was possible that the second time it would be met by armed force, now that its regime was proving the same weak and ineffectual debating society as its predecessors, and losing the confidence of neutral leaders and the vast mass which had hoped for a miracle in a few months. The lire, moreover, had continued to fall and the economic situation, which for three years of liberal governments had grown better daily despite the enormous payment of war debts amounting upwards to 25,000,000,000 lire in one year, now became worse, approached desperation. Perhaps a second "march within Rome" would be a failure.

From all sides came criticisms and criticism was one thing this journalist, who above all others should have realized and appreciated and valued, refused to hear. He knew the power of the press and feared it. Criticism can crush empires. He decided to smash it. Then there was a stream of irony from the speakers of the Opposition and from the comic press. This Mussolini could not understand and therefore could not forgive. He began planning revenge. In 1923 he organized the Cheka.

The chief enemy, of course, was his old party, the Socialist. "Skillful and astute in every political art, they protracted without end all the annoyances they could devise. It was a game played with the deliberate aim to destroy and tear down. In this subtle work of exasperation Matteotti, the deputy, distinguished himself above all others — he reached a degree of absurdity even beyond that attained by any other Socialist."

What Matteotti did was to settle upon Mussolini like a gadfly, a gadfly armed with two stings, irony and humor. The wounds left were incurable because they required, in the blood of the dictator, a prophylactic, a lymph, an antitoxin which he did not possess, and unable to heal himself he found he must destroy his adversary.

Day after day Matteotti would hurl at Mussolini the planks of the Fascist program of 1919, the written and signed pledges of 1920, and conclude with, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" "You have written that 'the Italian revolution of 1920 [the seizure of the factories by the proletariat] is a phase of the Fascist revolution begun by Fascists in May, 1915,'" Matteotti would say, holding aloft the Popolo d'Italia of September 28, 1920. "Do you deny it now?" and Mussolini would frown and double his fist and keep silent because he could not answer.

"I see by your own admission that 'Bolshevism is dead,'" Matteotti would say, "and now you declare that the chief object of your party is to fight Bolshevism — you would not whip a corpse, would you?" and Mussolini would not answer except by a threat and one of his favorite words, "coward" or "scoundrel" or "traitor."

"If, as you said, Italy has saved itself, when the Socialist Party expelled, in 1920, all the Communists and the violent enemies, how do you intend to save her again, how do you explain the civil war which the Fascists have inaugurated, their destructions, their burnings, their assassinations? How do you explain it?

"How do you explain that Fascism, playing the adulteress, has passed from the bed of the working-class to the bed of the capitalist class, betraying turn in turn, at its wish, at its fantasy?

"You have declared publicly and in writing that 'Fascism will never throw itself at the foot of the King because the King has no identity with the idea of Fatherland,' and you were the first to throw yourself at the foot of the King, you who announced for a Republic. How do you explain it?

"You have proclaimed the moral right of the regicide, you have denounced financiers as brigands, you have fought the army, you have attacked the clergy, you have denied that God exists, and today you are the chief defender of these persons and ideas. How do you explain yourself?"

Mussolini refused to reply publicly. But as he left for Lausanne to attend the Allied annual peacemaking congress, he gave Cesare Rossi, the one person to whom the word "friend" might be applied with any considerable correctness, the order to increase the Black Shirt squads to 500,000, a strength superior to the regular army of the King, and to organize within it a powerful secret political police which he called the "Ceca" and whose counterpart was then known in Russia as the Cheka, and now as the Gaypayoo.

Much to the amusement of those diplomats who knew the secret, was the tardy act of the Swiss government which had some seventeen years before expelled an undesirable Italian emigrant, placed his name on the consular black list maintained at frontier towns, and now was forced to expunge it and change all the police records of the new Premier of Italy, about to enter its peaceful borders.

"What is your foreign program?" asked Lord Curzon.

"My foreign policy is 'Nothing for nothing.'"

"Indeed," replied Curzon in his cold British Foreign Office way, "very interesting. Very interesting. And what has Italy to offer Great Britain?"

Silence.

From that day on, for many years, Mussolini trailed Curzon like a good little boy and Britain had a lot to say in Fascist diplomacy.

Returning to Rome, he found parliament protesting, playing the old game of talk, and the Italian press, about 80 per cent non-Fascist, exposing the assaults and violences the Black Shirts, now victoriously ruling, were committing in all parts of the country against Socialists, Liberals, Laborites, and Catholics alike.

All these Opposition parties, their leaders and the press, united in shouting one question to the new Premier, "What is your program." Never was a nation more puzzled over the supposed policies of a new regime. Fascism, the Opposition said, repeating Matteotti's words, had passed from bed to bed, like an adulteress, stopping a few months with the Communists, a little while with the Republicans, a long time with the syndicalists; it had been liberal and anti-liberal; it had proclaimed itself anti-Catholic and apparently had made a treaty with the Vatican; it had supported the monarchists and the reactionaries, and had at last again proclaimed itself in favor of the proletariat. What was its program? What did it intend to do?

On the eve of the 1919 elections Mussolini had written for campaign purposes the first program of the Fascio di Combattimento, [1] helping himself liberally to the ideas of Karl Marx, as the following parallel will show:

Communist Manifesto of 1848

Abolition of property in land and application of all rent of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of property of emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of the means of communications and transport in the hands of the State.
Extension of factories and the instruments of production in the hands of the State.
Equal obligation of all to work.

Original Fascist Program 1919

Extraordinary tax on capital, progressive, causing partial expropriation of all riches.
Seizure of all property of the religious associations.
Seizure up to 85 per cent of the war profits.
Formation of technical councils for industry, communications.
Proletarian organizations to manage public services.
Realization of the rights of the railroad workers. ("The railroads for the railroad workers.")
Participation of the workingmen in the management of industry.

And if this original Fascist program was not Karl Marxian enough, its author elaborated it in the fall of 1919 [2] adding:

The creation of an Italian national assembly to be part of an International Assembly of All Peoples (i.e., the equivalent of the Communist Internationale).

Freedom of thought, conscience, religion, association, press, propaganda, individual and collective agitation.

Creation of a national financial institution (vide Karl Marx, point 5, the national bank).

Confiscation of unproductive revenues.

All landed estates given to the peasants.

These two Radical-Communistic programs explain the possibility of Mussolini's negotiations with Buozzi, the head of the labor unions at the time Mussolini planned to make himself theirs and not the condottiere of the industrial associations of the North. It was Comrade Angelica who first opened the books of Karl Marx for the future Duce and taught him the ten points of the Communist Manifesto of 1848; it was Mussolini who remembered and rewrote them in 1919; and today in Italy it costs five years of a man's life to reprint the two programs given above. The Liparian Islands give the living proof.

On the 10th of November of the same year of the revised program Mussolini wrote, "We are preparing not against the working-class, but in its favor.

"We are so little kindly towards the bourgeoisie that we have placed at the head of our program expropriation of riches, confiscation of super profits of the war, heavy levy on capital. We will accept no dictatorship."

On the following day, "We are for liberty and against all tyranny."

And two days later, "The most sacred thing in the world — Liberty!

"In Italy there is no one who would be governed by anyone who arises in the name of the Messiah, or a Tsar, or God the Father. We want liberty for all. We demand that the Universal Will governs us and not the will of any group, or of any man."

Marching to victory, the Fascisti sang their now famous "Giovinezza,"

"Youth, Youth, thou lovely thing.
Time of springtime's blossoming.
Fascismo brings the promise
Of Liberty to the People."

But amidst the shouts of Liberty there were also mingled the sounds of the slogan inherited from d'Annunzio of Fiume, "Me ne frego (I don't give a damn)." Not a damn for anything but power.

"They ask us what is our program," exclaimed Mussolini in a speech a month before the "march"; "our program is very simple. We want to govern Italy."

More specifically, on the 4th of October he wrote in his Popolo: "The imbeciles, Jesuits and Democrats, incessantly demand a program of us. The Democrats of il Mondo, do they desire to know our program? To break the bones of the Democrats of il Mondo. And the sooner the better."

It was not until March, 1923, that the new Prime Minister delivered himself of the famous blast against liberalism and liberty and announced the first idea of the present Fascism program. He wrote: [3]

"Know then, once for all, that Fascism recognizes no idols, adores no fetishes; it has already passed over the more or less decayed body of the Goddess of Liberty, and is prepared, if necessary, to do so again."

Order, Discipline, Hierarchy! These three words were Mussolini's new program, the substitute for Liberty.

"Hierarchy," he wrote a little later, "must culminate in a pinpoint," meaning, of course, without any intention to belittle, no other than himself, the Duce.

Of the original 1919 program, which consists of seventeen points, but one or two have been remembered. The rest were immediately forgotten. Thus the Commission for Inquiry into the Expenses of the War (similar to the Congressional investigation in Washington into war profits) which the liberals had created and which would have recommended a confiscation of those profits which Mussolini demanded, was immediately dissolved by Decree 487. Moreover, Mussolini threatened to punish severely anyone who dared publish any information of the previous results obtained by the commission which had already forced the return of several hundred million lire to the Italian treasury.

"Another volte face" cried the Duce's enemies; "he is now the condottiere of the war profiteers."

There was no expropriation of the war profiteers, no expropriation of riches, no seizure of the property of the Catholic Church or other radical fulfillments of the program; there was no proletarian participation in industry, no abolition of the Senate, no proclamation of free speech and press, no division of land among the peasants. Yet the chief official biographer, Signora Sarfatti, writes that "in less than two years these demands (quoting the 1919 program, but omitting the final third) had been translated into action by the Fascist government."

Chivalry alone prevents comment.

From Rome the unimpeachable authority, William Bolitho, wrote: "The whole baggage of Fascist theory, its nationalism, its royalism, its gospel of violence, its anti-parliamentarianism and its denunciations of the liberty of the press, its hierarchy and its history of the Pelasgian stock [the forerunner of the Hitlerian Aryan myth], are not clauses in a social theory, but a sophisticated word-spinning around the incidents of an energetic and unscrupulous man's march to power."

But powerful as Mussolini was, he was still not so strong as those who made his career possible; he could not yet throw his financial backers overboard, nor could he defy the dangerous element which both had used — the army.

What thoughts were clashing in that egotistical mind in those days, what conflicts in his emotions, we can only guess; but we know that all those plans for justice for the common people, the distribution of land to the enserfed peasantry, the expropriation of the universally hated war profiteers, and all the Communistic plans out of Karl Marx, were in the early days of Fascism no mere word-spinning, no sham demagogic banners to attract the masses. In his own muddled way Mussolini had made a compromise between Karl Marx and his own Ego, between humanitarianism learned out of a book and the inborn Will to Power, a compromise which made explanation and program announcement difficult if not impossible. He temporized.

Much less difficult was the answer he made years afterwards when an interviewer asked him, "What is the chief problem of Fascism today?"

"Its duration," he replied.

_______________

Notes:

1. Vide Appendix I .

2. Vide Appendix I.

3. Appendix, "Fascism: 'Reactionary,' 'Anti-Liberal.'"

[admin]

CHAPTER 13: Personal Vendetta

EVEN BEFORE HE TOOK HIS FIRST DICTATORIAL STEPS, THE coalition Premier dispersed his enemies. It was good political tactics and it also provided the outlet for that powerful spirit of vendetta which had ruled his life from childhood.

He had been taught to trust nobody and he trusts nobody today. "If the Eternal Father were to say to me 'I am your friend,' I would put up my fists against Him," one of his closest associates sympathetically quotes the Duce saying, and again, "If my own father were to come back to the world I would not place my faith in him." It is the confession of a man who has gone through life friendless and alone. Mussolini never forgives, never forgets.

In 1923 he began his personal vendetta.

It will be remembered that the first to befriend young Benito in Switzerland was the Socialist Serrati — Giacinto Menotti Serrati, a native of Oneglia in Italy, an ardent syndicalist and, like Mussolini, an extremist of the Left wing at a time Communism was merely a theory.

So closely allied were the two that Serrati made Mussolini welcome at his home. There the latter was treated as a child by the mother of the former. Signora Serrati not only gave him that motherly sympathy which the young man so intensely needed, but she fed him and washed his clothes.

All went well until one day Serrati's sister and her husband arrived for a visit. Then an unfortunate drunken event occurred. After a violent scene. Comrade Benito was asked to leave the house. Whatever happened was apparently important enough to be reported in the press, where it is stated that "Mussolini played the villain with the sister of his benefactor, and the brother-in-law tried to strangle him."

Comrade Benito apologized. He wrote the following letter which Signora Serrati years later made public: "I beseech you to have pity on me and not to forget that I am the son of an alcoholic." The Serratis, however, were not impressed, because they knew that Papa Alessandro, the cafe-keeper, although a hard drinker, as were many in Forli, was not a drunkard. They did not forgive Mussolini and he never forgave Serrati.

The latter had drifted easily into extreme Socialism, had at one time been an envoy to Moscow, and at all times true to his radical upbringing. Mussolini had become the archenemy of his own past and every man connected with it. Some time after his arrival in power the new Cheka spies brought word that there was a radical conspiracy against the regime and that among the leaders was his old friend Serrati. Serrati was arrested. But the trial for treason and "inciting class hatred" failed and Serrati was freed. Mussolini greeted the news with fury. Turning to Cesare Rossi, [1] official of both the press bureau and the Cheka, he said:

"The next time an affair like this comes along I will send a patrol of national militia to San Vittore to await the liberated prisoners. The judicial authorities may liberate him, but I will shoot him. Each to his functions." But instead of shooting Serrati, Mussolini set his police agents on him, so that his old benefactor spent his remaining Italian years in misery.

The vendetta Mussolini-Nitti began in 1919 when d'Annunzio occupied Fiume and when the first conspiracy to seize Rome was being organized. With Mussolini, the Futurist revolutionary poet Marinetti, and several others were arrested on Nitti's warrants, which charged "armed plotting against the security of the nation."

Mussolini never forgave Nitti for the one night he spent in jail.

Explaining his action to parliament, Nitti had said:

"Those who inflame the public betray the interests of the country. Italy at present ought to inspire the utmost confidence abroad in order to obtain the credits she needs. A policy of adventurers would have us fall into anarchy. Workmen and peasants should check this dangerous adventure; they should warn us and Italy should push forward upon the road of renunciation and duty."

Mussolini's newspaper replied with broadsides of the most vulgar and insulting words outside the dictionary. There was freedom of the press in those days. Then one day a Nitti newspaper published the report that of the first million lire Mussolini had raised for Fiume he had used a third for his own armed bands. Mussolini added this insult to his memory. In all his writings, including the recent Autobiography, he turns again and again to denunciation of the former Liberal Premier:

"Nitti . . . was and remains a personality that is a negation of any ideal of life and of manly conflict. He has a fairly good knowledge of finances. He is impudent in his assertions. He is intensely egocentric. ... He never would face Bolshevism . . . (re Fiume) he summoned up the dangerous idea of protest by a general strike. . . . Nitti thought and acted only as a consequence of physical fear. Attacked full front and exasperated in his mad and miserable dream, he plotted with every means to overcome the resistance of the Fiumean legionaries. . . . The whole tone of his speech is vile, dreadfully vile. . . . One must not forget when considering aviation that Nitti had forbidden flight . . . his command was to demobilize the nation. ... It was a kind of premeditated murder of a nation which really did not want to be strangled. . . ."

In the autumn of 1923 the Cheka informed Mussolini that Nitti had returned to Rome and that Opposition deputies and journalists from New York and Manchester were callers at his house. Rossi, head of the Cheka, was consulted. According to him, Mussolini said:

"It looks as if the Rome Fascio does not exist, but remains inert as regarding men of the Opposition, otherwise it would make the presence of Nitti impossible in the capital."

Rossi admits he called upon Polverelli and Foschi, directors of the Rome unit, and told them the wishes of the Duce. The three then decided to call out some university men and others of the squadristi to visit Nitti and sing "Giovinezza" under his windows.

But the small group soon attracted several hundred more Fascisti, and once the mob spirit prevailed it was determined to murder Nitti. The house was entered. But Nitti happened to be hidden in an upper chamber. Everything in the villa was destroyed, including the former Premier's archives and the manuscript of a book on which he was working.

Nitti fled to France. But Mussolini's vendetta did not end at the frontier lines. For several years not a month has gone by without spies and agents of the Cheka coming to Nitti to attempt involving him in an anti-Fascist plot. The purpose is to prove to the French government that the former Premier is conspiring while in asylum; it is hoped that France will expel him.

How one of the latest Cheka plots turned out was told me the other day by Vincenzo Nitti, son of the Premier.

"Among the spies who come to our house," said he, "are several persons we knew well in Rome and whom we trusted. One of them proposed to us that we finance a revolution. Another brought us complete plans for large-scale bomb manufacture; if father would supply the funds and give his approval, he would make enough infernal machines to blow up the Fascisti, etc.

"But the best case is that of Signora B__, who arrived with clippings from the Rome newspapers saying she had been expelled from Italy because she was too anti-Fascist. She was a well-known actress, a young and beautiful and talented woman, and a friend of Mussolini's. I suspected at once that she was his agent.

"However, she and I became quite good friends. It was only when I noticed that she had a habit of taking papers — from coat pockets, too — that I became certain she was a Chekist. So I began planting all sorts of letters and documents, all of which she stole. In this way I was able to send directly to Signor Mussolini all communications I could not otherwise have made.

"But all the time I knew Signora B__ she pestered me about our underground press system. As you may know, we publish the Becco Giallo, the old satirical paper which Mussolini never could abide, here in Paris; we photograph it from the big sheets and print the miniature plates on India paper, so that we can send thousands in a small package.

"Well, one day, at a cafe, I pretended I was very drunk and the dear lady took advantage of that to ask me again to tell her in deepest confidence how we smuggled the propaganda into Italy. I told her we had two ways: whenever one saw a priest with an extraordinarily large stomach, crossing the frontier, you may be sure that under that black cassock there were several thousand copies of our publication. But our best way was in sardine-tins. In fact, the next day, when she confronted me with my 'confession' and I could not deny it, I had a workingman bring me a sample sardine-tin with a cover, and in it I placed ten copies of the Becco Giallo. I showed this to Signora.

"What happened? First of all, every fat priest crossing the frontier was hit across the stomach with the club of a Fascist militiaman, and believe me that did not further relations with the Vatican any. But afterwards there was a diplomatic incident you might have read about. It seems that at least many thousands of cans of sardines were opened at the frontier. And every can contained sardines, and all were spoiled, and the French and Italian governments got to making nasty remarks to each other about this wastage.

"Then Signora B__ arrived one day and told me she had been severely admonished by Mussolini and was going away to Buenos Aires. 'You've betrayed me' were the last words of this spy. And away she sailed to ply her spying trade in the Argentine Italian colony. Of course I cabled our friends to beware. But new Cheka agents arrive weekly, trying to provoke my father and myself into doing something illegal so Mussolini can report it to the French Foreign Office and thereby revenge himself on our family."

Vengeance against his old newspaper and old colleagues on the Avanti was carried out through many years. Mussolini's last words to Mme. Balabanoff and others of the staff were words of faith in Socialism and in its journalistic organ; he would never forget them, the theory was part of his blood, he could never betray them, never write against them, always love them.

But the Avanti, restored to anti-militarist editors, turned against Mussolini, calling him every vile name from traitor to "hired assassin of the bourgeoisie," the latter phrase being attributed to the woman who had picked him out of a dark corner and made him a great man. After a short campaign of vilification the Avanti decided upon another course: it would ignore him completely, and a rule was posted that his name should never be mentioned in the columns.

This rule was kept until November 18, 1919, when the Fascisti were completely whipped at the general elections and their political death, as well as that of its leader, generally (but prematurely) conceded. Said the Avanti:

"A corpse in an advanced state of putrefaction was dragged out of the Naviglio yesterday. It was identified as that of Benito Mussolini."

It was meant to be an obituary.

Ironic as this incident is, its sequel is tragic. For Mussolini never forgives and never forgets. He cannot survive irony. Writing of his parliamentary defeat of 1919 he said later:

"The Avanti wrote on that occasion a short notice about me. 'A dead body has been fished up from the Naviglio.' It was said in this note that in the night in the modest Naviglio canal which cuts Milan in two, a dead body had been picked up. According to the document they said it had been identified as the dead body of Benito Mussolini — his political corpse. They did not say that its eyes were gazing ahead."

What Mussolini never forgot was the mock funeral which the Socialists and the Avanti crowd held that day. "The procession passed under the windows of my house ... I have not forgotten the episode, but I always see it. . . ."

The crowds had gathered in the streets. The Socialist victory had been impressive. Placards were printed with just these words: "Turati 180,000; Mussolini 4000," and given away, to be waved under the eyes of the landowners and the factory-owners and the gentlemen looking out of big offices and big club windows. Francesco Zanardi, mayor of Bologna, came out to salute the masses with a wave of his arms. Speeches were not necessary. There was no hatred, because the election had proved there was no enemy worth hating.

The funeral notice of the Avanti thrilled the crowd. Someone proposed a funeral procession, and soon a hack was found, a wooden coffin-like box placed on it, black drapings and funereal flowers. A man climbed on the shoulders of another and was carried ahead of the coffin, imitating a priest, singing a ribald litany, concluding always with his "Requiem aeternam," to which the mob joyously responded "Amen, Amen." Psalms were parodied amidst laughter and applause. Numerous candles were lighted and relighted and a sort of carmagnole atmosphere filled the city as vast crowds mocking Mussolini paraded before his house, calling, "Come on out to see your own funeral," and, "At last we honor you."

(It was two days later that the Fascisti threw a bomb at another Socialist march and the government, searching the Arditi clubrooms, found a lot of war material, all of which resulted in Nitti's order for many arrests, including Mussolini's.)

He always saw that ribald funeral. It rankled in his mind, it penetrated his subconscious the moment he received the telegram from General Cittadini confirming the telephone call from Rome to take over the government. The first thing Mussolini did was to fulfill his vendetta. Rossi describes what happened that day. "The new president of the council, the Honorable Mussolini, in this wise began his mission for the restoration of national discipline in October, 1922:

"Meeting me at eleven o'clock in the morning at a school situated on the bastions of Piazza Nuova and employed those days as a bar- racks by the Fascist mobilization, he gave to several of his brigades news and an order. The news was that he had received a royal telegram charging him to form a new Ministry; the order was 'to proceed during the day with the scientific destruction of the buildings of the Avanti and the Giustizia, on the San Gregorio road.'"

The two newspapers were partly destroyed by bands led by Negrini and Forni, the latter a Deputy of the national parliament. The interiors were wrecked. The men of the Black Shirts, armed with guns, clubs, and fire, smashed everything, tore up the books, broke the furniture, and becoming frightened that the picture they left behind them would be used against them, poured gasoline over everything and set the buildings on fire. One old man found in hiding was murdered.

Neither the militia nor the police, who were informed that the building was being pillaged, made any effort to stop the squadristi and the firemen received an order not to intervene until the vandalism was complete and there was danger of fire spreading to other houses.

To the destruction of the Avanti, Mussolini's assistant editor, Signora Sarfatti, points with pride; she recalls the racketeers marching four abreast, carrying a blood-stained helmet, charred pieces of wood of the building, other souvenirs of vandalism. "We had begun our offensive," Mrs. Sarfatti bursts out rapturously.

Mussolini himself defends it: "As an answer to the anti-Fascist provocation I ordered another general mobilization of the Fascisti. . . . The Fascist technicians were to be brought together to continue the work in the public services. The squadristi were to disperse subversive organizations. The Fascisti of Milan assaulted the Avanti, which was considered the lair of our opponents. They burned the offices."

Another newspaper which Mussolini hated for its fairness, its honesty, and' its liberalism was the Corriere delta Sera. It stood in Italy as the leading honest newspaper, much like the Manchester Guardian in England, the Frankfurter Zeitiung in pre-Hitler Germany, and the late lamented New York World. One day Mussolini denounced it.

"The Corriere della Sera," said the Popolo, "should be treated as a Jesuit and as a scoundrel, and above all as a coward."

The same evening at eleven o'clock a bomb was thrown at the Corriere. Similarly when the Fascist Minister Giuriati delivered a violent speech in Milan, attacking opposition newspapers, the Fascio again invaded and devastated the offices of the socialist Giustizia.

Mussolini first expressed his hatred for the Corriere on the day he founded his Fascisti, when, he admits, only fifty-four persons signed "our program which was necessary to lay the foundations for a new civilization." The meeting passed almost unnoticed. The Corriere, however, did in fact mention it, but "that great liberal newspaper dedicated to this news about twenty lines in its columns!" The exclamation mark, Mussolini's, is the expression of his chagrin and disgust.

It turned into fury when the Corriere accepted Woodrow Wilson's proposal for arbitration of the Flume boundaries. Treason, shouted d'Annunzio's consul in Milan.

In 1923 the Corriere joined with Don Sturzo and all liberal elements in supporting the proportional-representation law and opposing the Fascist proposal which gave this minority party two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies. As Fascism could not hope for a majority and yet desired to appear legal, such opposition was extremely dangerous to it. Finally, in 1924, the Corriere published the documents implicating Mussolini in political assassination, and since the Duce could not suppress his enemy legally, as he had no ground for libel and feared popular reaction if he used violence, as in the case of the Avanti or the Giustizia, he smashed the great free liberal newspaper through an intrigue among the intimidated stockholders. When the Corriere passed into Fascist hands the London Times said that Mussolini had made Italy suspected and incomprehensible; the disappearance of the independent Corriere della Sera, it continued, editorially, was "a serious loss to European civilization."

_______________

Notes:

1. Vide Rossi memoranda.

[admin]

CHAPTER 14: The Assassination of Matteotti

BUT HOW WAS IT POSSIBLE FOR FASCISM TO RULE A NATION WHICH was strongly anti-Fascist? Five political parties representing a majority of the people, the best part of the press including all the great newspapers, the labor unions with their millions of adherents, the best minds, including Croce and Ferrero, in fact all Italy except the associations of industrialists, the bankers, their commercial allies and their Black Shirt militia, opposed the new regime whose military conspiracy they had been unable to frustrate.

The only road from the dilemma was suppression of the press and elimination of Opposition political parties. It was the road Moscow took after the attempted assassination of Lenin in 1918, but Mussolini, envious of Russian success, was still afraid to emulate its methods.

Meanwhile he was being attacked by internal enemies. The financial backers were demanding payment on their investment.

One day in the Chamber of Deputies the now acknowledged speaker of the five Opposition parties, Matteotti, informed the nation that the Fascist State was paying its debts to big business in many ways; it had secretly used public funds to refloat the Ansaldo enterprise, which was near bankruptcy; it had purchased 18,000 shares of the Mineral Oil Refinery of Fiume; it had rescued the Banca di Roma and it had permitted the heavy industry Consortium to draw upon the banks of issue for credit, in addition to obtaining secret subventions. Moreover, the Fascist regime was engaged in a deal by which the Sinclair Oil Company of America would obtain a monopoly in Italy; although the American corporation was acting legitimately, several of the highest members of Mussolini's staff were attempting to make millions in graft out of this enterprise.

Matteotti's second point of attack was the corruption of academic liberty in the universities.

His third was an exposure of the violence by which the Fascist victory at the April 6th elections had been achieved.

With a hint of these scandals which he intended to document in ensuing speeches, Matteotti on the 30th of May, 1924, began his campaign against the regime while Italy listened breathlessly and with secret satisfaction.

"In the last election," said Matteotti, "the government, having declared it intended to remain in power no matter what the result, nevertheless implemented this declaration by employing its armed militia. . . ."

Mussolini interrupted. "Enough. Stick to the question."

Matteotti: The honorable president perhaps did not hear me. I am speaking of the elections. There exists an armed militia whose fundamental purpose is to sustain a certain chief of government, well known to you, a certain duce of Fascism, and not, as with the army, the head of a state. Now while the law says that the militia must abstain from all political functions, we saw throughout Italy that this militia . . .

Farinacci: You must have seen the Balilla (the Fascist boy scouts).

Matteotti: In truth, Honorable Farinacci, it was the Balilla which in many districts did the voting.

The orator then began the list of violences. As each shout of "liar" and "falsifier" and "prove it" arose from the Fascist benches, Matteotti brought out the sworn statements, the Fascist newspapers, the Fascist orders for violence. Mussolini squirmed and scowled.

Matteotti: And at Genoa, when the Honorable Gonzales [member of parliament] came to address a meeting, the hall was invaded by Fascisti who blackjacked . . .

Voice from Fascist benches: "Liar."

Matteotti: Well, then I will correct myself. If the Honorable Gonzales spent eight days in the hospital it means that he had wounded himself, that he had not been blackjacked. The Honorable Gonzales is a disciple of Saint Francis — perhaps he had flagellated himself. . . .

Mussolini: Honorable colleagues, I deplore what is happening. Honorable Matteotti, be brief; conclude.

Matteotti: I will limit myself to nude and crude exposition of facts. . . ." He cited case after case in which members of parliament as well as other speakers had been assaulted by Fascist racketeers. As each new name was added the tumult increased.

Mussolini: Conclude. Honorable Matteotti, do not provoke scenes.

Matteotti: I protest. If you cannot see that it is the others who are stopping me, who are making scenes . . .

Mussolini: Well, you've finished! Let the Honorable Rossi speak.

Matteotti: What's the idea? It is your duty to protect my right to speak, I am merely reciting a list of facts. I have the right to be respected.

Mussolini: Let the Honorable Casertano speak.

Matteotti: I protest.

Mussolini: Well, then, speak, but prudently. . . .

Matteotti: I do not desire to speak prudently nor imprudently, only parliamentarily.

Mussolini (with a gesture of disdain): Well, speak.

Matteotti: The Honorable Piccinini was assassinated in his home for having accepted candidature against the Fascist list. . . .

The list of murders and assaults was continued.

There followed a description of election-day terror — assaults, stuffed ballot-boxes, forcible prevention, threats of death to every elector not a Fascist.

"And so," continued Matteotti, with smiling sarcasm, "only a small minority of the Italian people was allowed to vote, and these citizens can hardly be suspected of being Socialists."

In a previous speech Mussolini had listed many political crimes and acts of violence. He repeated the Fascist propaganda claim that Fascist crime was always in self-defense against the criminal provocation of the Socialists, Matteotti took up the crimes one by one; in every case he quoted Mussolini's own newspaper or the impartial Corriere delta Sera, the findings of the courts, and the police records; in every case Matteotti proved from Fascist or neutral sources that the aggressors were always the police or the Fascist squadristi.

Mussolini could not conceal his hatred or his raging anger. Matteotti, like a young apostle, spoke "with inexhaustible energy, indomitable tenacity, with inspired fervor, obstinate, implacable, accomplishing his sacred mission at all costs."

When the Deputies walked out of the Chamber that evening and all the liberal elements clustered around Matteotti, congratulating him, he said, laughingly, "And now, my colleagues, you may prepare my funeral oration for the Chamber."

It is a fact that it was that very day that the Fascist Cheka discussed the case. On the morning of the 1st of June appeared a front-page editorial in the Popola d'Italia, unsigned but written by Mussolini, [1] demanding physical violence against Matteotti. The epithets and threats in the Chamber were not enough, said the editorial; what was needed was a more tangible acknowledgment.

But the first speech of Matteotti's concerning the fraudulent election and the facts known throughout the country of the two forthcoming speeches were having tremendous political reaction. Mussolini felt it necessary to defend himself, and did so with amazing Machiavellianism. Suppose it were established, he said, that a million and a half votes cast for the Fascist list were fraudulent, the Fascist Party would still remain in power as rightful representative of the nation.

"You of the Opposition," he continued, "complain that you were restrained from holding free election meetings. What of it? Such meetings are of no use, anyway."

But the damning climax came a few days later. Mussolini lost his head completely. On the 6th of that crucial June, with Matteotti scheduled to make his most dangerous revelations of Fascist violence and financial corruption on the 10th, when the atmosphere throughout Italy had become evidently hostile, the other Opposition leaders continued the Matteotti policy of irony and iron facts, Mussolini became almost hysterical with hatred. When one member drew a parallel of Fascism and Bolshevism, Mussolini shouted:

"In Russia they are great masters. We have only to imitate what is being done in Russia."

Uproar followed. Approval. Disapproval. Shouts. Waving of fists, the Right and Left benches threatening blows.

"They are magnificent masters," Mussolini repeated. "And we are wrong not to imitate them in full, so you would not now be here— you would be in jail."

Uproar. Applause. "We've just come from there," shouted a Communist.

"You would have a bullet through your spine," roared Mussolini. Another interruption. "We have the courage. We will prove it." Applause from the Fascisti. "We are always in time," continued Mussolini "and it will be done sooner than you think."

That same evening a journalist named Carlo Silvestri met Cesare Rossi, co-director of the Cheka. Rossi, as Silvestri later at the risk of his life testified under oath, said to him:

"With people like Matteotti the only thing to do is let the revolver speak. . . .

"If they knew what passes through Mussolini's head at times they would lay low.

"Mussolini is fully determined to carry out his threats. Anyone who knows him must know that every now and then Mussolini needs bloodshed — and counsels of moderation will not always prevail."

A boy of twelve, to whom Matteotti had been pointed out frequently as a "great man" since he was a member of parliament, and an old woman dozing in her doorway but suspicious over the actions of five men and their automobile, were the two accidental witnesses who betrayed the murderers and almost caused the downfall of Fascism. The woman noted the number of the automobile.

"Porca Madonna! Bastava avessero pisciato sulla targa," Mussolini exclaimed to his secretary, Fasciolo, when he heard about this old woman.

The boy testified:

"I was playing with my companions. Near us was a motor-car which had stopped just by Via Antonio Scialoja. Five men got out and began walking up and down, up and down. Then I saw Signor Matteotti come out. One of the men went forward and when near him gave him a violent push, making him fait to the ground. Signor Matteotti cried out. Then the other four men came up and one of them struck him a hard blow in the face. Then they took him by his head and feet and carried him into the car which came by us. So we were able to see that Signer Matteotti was struggling. We saw nothing more afterwards, as they rode away."

Of the five men in the car the ringleader was Amerigo Dumini, Rossi's colleague in the Cheka and "household friend" of Mussolini. He is American born, his father having emigrated from Italy and settled in St. Louis, where he married an American woman, Jessie Williams. Returning to Italy, Amerigo followed the calling for which he had been trained in American slums; he was a common gangster. In Italy he is first heard of as coming and going in Mussolini's office in Milan and in Mussolini's home. After he had committed his first murder and the Milan Fascisti under Mussolini's guidance had saved him from punishment, Mussolini began to use him for various purposes. Several times a week Dumini called to receive the "suggestions" of Mussolini and Rossi.

Like a bad man in the bad days of the American Wild West, Dumini made notches on his revolver for each mortal crime. Just before the Matteotti assassination he got into the habit of introducing himself boastfully as "Amerigo Dumini — Eleven murders." Confident he would be freed, he boasted of the death of Matteotti.

Kidnapped, beaten, stabbed, mutilated, burned, parts of the body of Mussolini's great political enemy were buried, disinterred, left for the foxes and pariah dogs to worry, then buried again. There is no evidence to the report that a part of the body had been sent to Mussolini as proof of the death, but there are confessions that bloodstained garments, the passport, and other identity papers of the murdered man were sent to him. With blood on their hands and joy in their voices high officials of the Fascist Cheka came immediately to Mussolini's office to tell him that the enemy was dead.

Parliament had waited, some members angrily, some anxiously, for Matteotti to deliver the last and most dangerous of his accusations; he had already proven that the election was a fraud; now he was to prove that most of the Fascist mandates were obtained by fraud or violence, were invalid, that the Fascist Party, in fact, had no right to occupy the majority benches in the Chamber. Such an exposure at a time the nation was pretty tired of Fascist pretensions and Fascist violence and the failure of the regime to redeem its radical promises, could have brought on a new election, with the probable defeat of Fascism.

As the hours passed and Matteotti did not appear it became rumored that he had been killed. In fact there were such whispers hours before the murder had been completed. Because that was the mood and circumstance of the nation in those days: when a prominent liberal somehow failed to keep an appointment, to arrive for dinner in time, to show up in his office at his usual hour, it was taken for granted that he must have fallen in with some of Mussolini's glorified squadristi, beaten up, forced to take castor oil, or murdered. Therefore the Left benches whispered tragedy.

The next day the whispers became loud. They penetrated the inner circle. Turning to faithful Rossi on their way back from Montecitorio, Mussolini said with that heavy sarcasm which his admirers call a sense of humor: "The Socialists are disturbed because they cannot find Matteotti — he must have gone to a brothel."

On the morning of the 12th, Rossi not only informed Mussolini that Matteotti had been assassinated, but that "the murder can only have been the work of people belonging to the Fascist Party Cheka." [2] Later in the day Filippelli rushed in frantically with the same news: Matteotti was dead, the Dumini gang had killed him and buried him.

That afternoon Signora Matteotti came to parliament seeking news from her husband's friends. Mussolini sent a messenger asking her to the Foreign Office.

When the widow arrived in the magnificent hall of the Palazzo Chigi, Mussolini sprang to his feet and stood at attention, as before a high officer. The effect of this gesture was to cause Madame Matteotti's collapse in tears.

"Signora, I should like to restore your husband alive to you. You may be assured that the government will do its utmost duty. We know nothing for certain, but there is still some hope."

The murderers had confessed. The hired assassins had come with their proofs, the blood-stained passport and blood-stained clothes; the body had been hacked to pieces, burned, buried; the chief of police had been informed and he had told Mussolini. But, there was still hope!

The widow of Matteotti was led to the door by the Duce himself. He bowed her out. Returning to his desk, he immediately sent for Rossi.

"There is nothing to be done," he said; "the boys have made too many mistakes. I am powerless. De Bono is good for nothing. All under suspicion must be patient. I must have my hands free to make the counter-attack. The hour of revenge will come."

At 7:30 that evening Mussolini, addressing the Chamber, concluded: "I hope that Honorable Matteotti will shortly be able to resume his place in parliament."

That night Dumini was arrested.

The next morning there was panic in Italy.

Mussolini ordered his militia mobilized. In Rome itself only half its strength responded; in Milan, birthplace of Fascism, the Duce's own bailiwick, only a quarter responded, and no one answered the call to the black colors in the industrial city of Turin.

On that day and following days the pictures of the most photographed man in the world were torn from the walls of Italy or smeared with the word "Assassin" or "Morte a Mussolini." From the liberal printing-presses came a flood of pictures of Matteotti which were pasted over that of the Duce with "Viva Matteotti" in red paint. The black shirt and the black cap disappeared from the streets, the leaders of Fascism were in tremulous hiding, and a cry for freedom and liberty arose in the land.

Cardinal Maffi of Pisa, the most brilliant mind, the most liberal thinker in the Catholic Church, telegraphed to Mussolini: "As a priest I weep; as an Italian I am ashamed."

The King considered calling the loyal army, proclaiming martial law, abolishing the illegal Fascist militia, restoring democratic government. But he was afraid. The Opposition parties had only to take one decisive action, but for four days they talked and talked because they foresaw two or three hundred men killed in the rioting which must ensue before Fascism was abolished; despite the fact they had already lost four thousand men, dead in fighting with the Black Shirts, they decided not to shed more blood but hope for peaceful evolution without action.

Those four days Fascism was a living corpse. But there was no one willing to kick it into oblivion.

The day of the panic Mussolini addressed the Chamber. That brave man of the twenty feminine biographies, that soldier-hero who loved to taunt the Austrian army by perching himself on the parapet of the front-line trenches, that demigod of power who never knew fear, the implacable, the pitiless Mussolini, arose, but his body slumped; he spoke, but his words trembled, his gestures were pale, ineffectual. He was a whipped man.

"If there is anyone in this hall who, more than any person, should be heart-broken, even, exasperated," he said in a voice no one recognized as Mussolini's, "that person is me. Only one of my enemies who would during the long nights consider such a diabolical action could have committed the crime which today strikes with horror and makes us cry out in indignation. . . .

"The situation, gentlemen, is extremely delicate . . . one must deplore, one must condemn, one must push the inquest for the search of all the guilty and all those responsible, and we are here to repeat that all this will be done, tranquilly, inexorably. . . .

"The law will be executed. The police will deliver the guilty to the judicial authorities. . . . One must be calm and refuse to amplify the terrible and stupid incident into a question of general politics and the policy of the government. . . .

"Justice will be done, must be done, because the crime is a crime which is anti-Fascist and anti-nation. It is more than horrible, it is of a bestial humanity. One must not hesitate before such an act to separate crime from politics."

Justice, of course, was never done. Dumini, it is true, was in prison, but Dumini was a household friend and could be relied upon to keep his mouth shut. That very day agents went to the other four murderers and gave them money to flee the country. And years later Mussolini was able to comment in his autobiography:

"One day Matteotti disappeared from Rome. Immediately it was whispered about that a political crime had been committed. The Socialists were looking for a martyr who might be of use for purposes of oratory, and at once, before anything definite could possibly be known, they accused Fascism. By my orders we began a most painstaking and complete investigation. The government was determined to act with the greatest energy, not only for the sake of justice, but also to stop, from the very first moment, the spread of any kind of calumny. I threw the prefect and police chief of Rome, the Secretary of the Interior, Finzi, and the chief of the press office, Cesare Rossi, into the task of clearing up the mystery. Activity on the part of the police for the discovery of the guilty persons was ordered without stint. Very soon it was possible to identify the guilty. They were of high station. They came from the Fascist group, but they were completely outside our responsible elements.

". . . It seemed hardly possible that only a few days after the opening of the twenty-sixth legislature a group of men of position could carry through an enterprise which, begun as a jest, was to conclude in a tragedy. I always have had harsh and severe words for what happened. . . ."

To this same Cesare Rossi, Mussolini's right-hand man, his most intimate friend from Socialist days and the writer of eulogistic prefaces to innumerable biographies of Mussolini in days of Fascist triumph, all the acts of violence of the two years of Mussolini's rule were not jests, they were the bloody realities of successful government. Now on the r4th of June he saw himself made the sacrificial goat of the hierarchy. He went into hiding. But before he did so he wrote a confession, which he intrusted to his friend Virgili, saying it was to be published only if Mussolini betrayed him, and he sent a similar threat to Mussolini.

The Rossi "memoriale" lists criminal acts Rossi charges against the dictator in addition to complicity in the Matteotti murder. Rossi concludes:

"All this happened according to the direct will or complicity of the Duce. I allude to the clubbing of Deputy Amendola, the order given De Bono, commanding general of the Fascist militia and director of the police, by Mussolini, unknown to me and executed by Candelori, console of the militia; the beating of Deputy Misuri carried out by Balbo, generalissimo of the militia, at the suggestion of Mussolini; the aggression upon Forni, candidate in the April elections, for which the order was given me personally by Mussolini and carried out in agreement with Giunta, secretary-general of the Fascist Party; the attack on the villa of ex-Premier Nitti; the recent demonstrations against the Opposition parties ordered by Mussolini to be undertaken by Foschi, secretary of the party for the province of Rome; the proposal advanced by Mussolini to the Quadrumvirato, the central assembly of the party, in order that the Honorable Ravazolo, Fascist Deputy, should be given a well-earned lesson in consequence to his insubordination; the destruction of the Catholic clubs in Brianza ordered by Mussolini, carried out by the Fascist Deputy Maggi and then complacently repeated to me. I add that daily Commendatore Fasciolo, Mussolini's secretary, had the order, at the suggestion of Mussolini, to forward to the Fascist locals the names of subscribers of the Voce Republicana, Avanti, Giustizia, Unita, Italia Libera, et cetera, so that the subscribers might be dosed with castor oil and clubbed."

In a second memorandum Rossi lists thirty-seven murder and clubbing orders or suggestions from Mussolini. Number 13: "Mussolini expressed his regret that we did not succeed in beating up Matteotti on his way home from a convention." Number 21: "Mussolini ordered the murder of several radicals who had succeeded in worming their way into the Milan Fascist local." Number 32: "Mussolini ordered the founding of the Cheka." Number 36: "Mussolini's ambiguous relation to the assassination of Matteotti.

"I, Cesare Rossi," he concludes, "who on his order have been left in the lurch, accused, vilified, and made out a liar, have no longer any duty to remain faithful to Mussolini or to conceal the truth.

"I have also lost all faith in the regime and the Fascist Party which accepts and approves not only these acts of violence, but also all terrible crimes. Mussolini, the government and the party, in June made a political crime out of a tragic crime; it is due to the blind egotism of the Duce, the perfidy of General De Bono, the apathy of the party, and the panicky anxiety of the masses.

"I publish this memorandum to protect my honor. I feel also that I am taking a wise and necessary step in the service of my fatherland. With a firm hand and a clear conscience, I sign, Cesare Rossi."

But clear as that conscience may be, this same Rossi, as head of the Cheka, stands accused by all parties in Italy, Fascists, anti-Fascists, Catholics, and Republicans, in many of the crimes he himself lists, including that against Matteotti.

Other leaders of Fascism were going into hiding, fleeing the country, or protecting themselves against Mussolini by writing out confessions to be intrusted to friends or journalists. Filippo Filippelli, director of the Fascist Rome organ, Corriere Italiano, in his memorandum given to the journalist Naldi and attested by him later before a magistrate, accuses not only Mussolini and the assassin Dumini, but also Rossi; he speaks of the agreement for the murder by these three leading gentlemen and details their complicity. Filippelli relates the events of the Wednesday, June 11, when, alarmed by the news of the disappearance of Matteotti and the rumors that the Cheka had acted, he went to Rossi, who, he testifies, related to him:

"That Dumini had told him that he had used the car which in all good faith I had lent him;

"That the matter was serious;

"That Mussolini knew everything;

"That Marinelli and he [Rossi] had given the orders after previously agreeing with Mussolini;

"That the thing must be hushed up, otherwise Mussolini himself would be smashed."

The Filippelli memorandum continues:

"I thought it expedient to inform De Bono, Finzi, Marinelli, and others. From Finzi and others I learned that:

"The victim of Dumini's outrage was Matteotti;

"That the order to suppress him had been given by the Cheka of the National Fascist Party, of which the executioners were Dumini and others well known to Mussolini, who knew also of this special mission;

"That they had had an interview with Mussolini that day [June 11th] and that they had handed to Mussolini the papers and the passport of Matteotti as proof of his disappearance."

Filippelli fled. Mussolini sent his secretary, Fasciolo, to Rossi to make terms with him and to ask him to leave Rome. Finzi, seized with the same panic which had driven Rossi and Filippelli to write confessions, made a testament which he gave to his friend, Schiff-Giorgini, and the journalist Silvestri. Finzi's brother told Guglielmo Emmanuel, correspondent of the Corriere delta Sera, the Hearst International News Service, and the New York American, the contents of the confession.

The search for scapegoats continued; the panic continued, and still the Opposition talked and refused to ask the King to outlaw the outlaw party. Mussolini had Filippelli dragged out of hiding and taken to prison; he ordered General De Bono to resign as chief of police, and he himself made one of the grandiose gestures of his career: he gave up one of the many portfolios he, as dictator, had accumulated for himself; he resigned as Home Secretary, and as a sop to the monarchy and the Vatican, both unfriendly now, he named Federzoni, head of the old Nationalist Party, Royalist and Catholic, in his place. Throughout Italy members of the Fascist Cheka were placed in jail. Rossi was finally arrested.

Humbly, very humbly, Mussolini began to make amends. To the Chamber he said on the 24th: "The crime against the person of the Honorable Matteotti has wounded and moved profoundly the Italian public opinion which loudly demands justice.

"The voice has been and will be heard.

". . . Out of this crime, which has had profound repercussions in the national conscience, there may be born a period of concord and peace among the Italian people."

On the 26th of June Mussolini abandoned the dictatorship!

With tears in his eyes.

He had in his pocket the letter from Rossi calling him a doomed man— the letter smuggled out of jail, saying, "If during the coming days you fail to furnish me proof of solidarity, not so much for the past and for my position as your collaborator and executor of our sometime illegal orders, but of your solidarity for essentially governmental reasons, I shall put into effect what I told you. I deem it superfluous to warn you that if the revolting cynicism which you have displayed up to now, complicated by fear that has seized you just at the time you should dominate a situation created exclusively by you, should advise you to order free violence, while I am in jail or in the unfortunate case of my arrest, you will equally be a doomed man, and with you will be destroyed the regime. . . ."

With tears in his eyes the "doomed man" addressed the leaders of Fascism in the magnificent gold and brocaded Palazzo Venezia.

"There is no longer a question that Matteotti was assassinated," said Mussolini; "it is no longer a question whether six or fifteen or twenty or thirty individuals are in prison, it is no longer a question whether the Ministry is to remain or to be transformed, if the party is to be cleaned: one sees now clearly the goal of the Opposition, it is the regime itself. They propose to annul all that it signifies, from the point of view of morals and politics. So you see the game become most attenuated. I declare to you I do not propose to see annihilated a state of things which we have created with grand efforts, with much pain, with, indeed, much bloodshed. . . .

"I admit that the militia should be promptly included in the armed forces of the State.

"And because I have been reproached for not having let it take the oath of allegiance to the King, I engage myself to have that formality executed now.

"What will be my program?

"What I have said before, I repeat. I propose to have the Chamber, the parliament, function. I repeat: it is my intention in the future not to issue decrees, because if the government makes its own laws, then the Chamber has nothing to do.

"We will enter into legality, absolute, and repress illegality; clean out the party. ... I am disposed to follow a policy of conciliation and to forget the past, to forget all the battles of the past."

The abolition of the illegal militia, the one element upon which Fascism rested, farcing itself upon a mass now no longer willing to give it a chance or to accept it at any price, would have meant the collapse of dictatorship. "Enter into legality" would have meant the collapse of the dictatorship. The moment the five Opposition parties could be assured a legal election they would have obtained a legal majority reducing Fascism to a third or fourth party. The abolition of rule by decrees would have meant the end of dictatorship. All this Mussolini promised the day he was a doomed man and had tears in his eyes.

This abnegation of dictatorship was due to the reaction of the press. After two years of Fascism the total number of readers of the party papers was 400,000 while the anti-Fascists with their great and popular journals and their support by the great majority of Italians had at least 4,000,000 readers.

Scared by the press, Mussolini had, in accordance with its demands, resigned one office, and rid himself of members of the Quadrumvirate, the Pentarchy, the men who made him and his party. Among the founders of Fascism who were driven out were General De Bono, Undersecretary of the Interior Finzi, Chief of the Press Bureau Rossi, Administrative Secretary of the Fascist Party Marinelli, Editor of the Fascist Organ Filippelli, Chief Assassin Dumini, and "six or fifteen or twenty or thirty individuals," all in prison.

The press almost brought about a revolution. It did in fact inflame the mass mind to the point of rebelling. A word from the King or an order from Amendola, the new leader of the five Opposition parties, would have ended by small violence the dictatorship Mussolini himself had declared abandoned. But no word or order ever came.

The morning after the Premier's confession of a return to legality the Opposition parties met at Montecitorio and unanimously voted a motion. They talked a lot, and what they did was to sign a paper. The document is important because it is the accusation not only of Matteotti's party, but also the Republican Party, the Catholic Party, and two other non-liberal or non-radical parties, that Mussolini is the responsible accomplice of the assassination.

The resolutions called international attention to the existence of the Fascist Cheka, "grafted on the very organization of the government and by the confidants of the Chief of Government [Mussolini]; it placed the blame for the assassinations upon the President of the Council [Mussolini]; and it concluded by announcing the abstention of the Opposition parties from parliamentary participation.

In America not a line appeared about the Matteotti case because the newspapers were filled to overflowing with news of another murder, that committed in Chicago by two young neurotic millionaires, named Loeb and Leopold. But in England Premier MacDonald attended a meeting of the Labor Party at which a resolution was passed condemning the assassination and sending the sympathy of British labor to the Socialist Party of Italy.

Pope Pius was terribly shocked. Finzi, whose complicity was generally admitted, had married a niece of Cardinal Vannutelli, dean of the Sacred College and one of the closest associates of the Pope. Cardinal Gasparri made visits to both the mother and widow of Matteotti, expressing his sympathy and horror.

From New York Luigi Barzini, editor of the Corriere d' America, cabled Mussolini, advising him to purge the Fascist Party, drive out the Black Hand, see that justice was done and that Fascist prestige was restored.

Italy's leading intellectual, the philosopher Croce, passed the following verdict upon the regime: "The Fascist movement is incapable of setting up a new type of State despite the ostentatious utterances of its supporters; therefore Fascism in my judgment could not and should not be anything more than a bridge to lead to the restoration of a more strictly liberal regime in the frame of a stronger State. . . . Because Fascism cannot create a new constitutional and judicial organization as a substitute for that of Liberalism, it finds itself forced to move along by the same violent means that accompanied its birth, and so it perpetuates what should have been occasional and transitory. In this series of violent actions we cannot exactly see at what point we are to stop."

Weeks passed. The five Opposition parties became known as the Aventine. They met. They talked. Their one great gesture was to withdraw from parliament; after which they did nothing. They were socialists and reformists who did not believe in direct action, in arms, in violence, legal or illegal.

Not so Farinacci. "Farinacci the Sadist," as he was frequently called, was unaffected by bloodshed or murder or revolutionary hysteria. He sneered at weakness. He despised the Socialist pacifists and he jeered at Mussolini for acting as timidly as they did. The Duce became the meek follower of his assistant; the desperate, sick man accepted the doctor Farinacci's violent remedy, and between July 29 and September 30, 1924, he instructed the Cheka and the squadron leaders in metropolitan centers to revive the 1922 terror. Sixteen anti-Fascists were murdered, 36 seriously wounded, 172 assaulted; 46 homes and clubs of Socialists, Catholics, and labor organizations were destroyed. [3]

Most important of all was the decree abolishing freedom of the press. (Freedom here is underlined to distinguish it from a later decree abolishing the opposition press; the first placed it in the hands of censors, the latter ended its existence.) Newspapers were burned, presses smashed, buildings destroyed.

As the voices of opposition were stilled in fire and blood, the hero-conqueror found his own. He forgot his promise of justice, he forgot the "return to legality," he issued nothing but decrees, and the militia which he had sworn to disband he used for the purpose of destroying his political enemies. And when the time came for him to write his autobiography for the Saturday Evening Post he forgot even the fact that Matteotti had been murdered.

"The course of Italian public life from June to December, 1924," he wrote, "offered a spectacle absolutely unparalleled in the political struggle in any country. It was a mark of shame and infamy which would dishonor any political group. The press, the meetings, the subversive and anti-Fascist parties of every sort, the false intellectuals, the defeated candidates, the soft-brained cowards, the rabble, the parasites, threw themselves like ravens on the corpse [of Matteotti]. The arrest of the guilty was not enough. The discovery of the corpse and the sworn statement of surgeons that death had not been due to crime but had been produced by a trauma, was not enough. . . .

"I did not have a moment of doubt or discouragement . . . the swelled frogs waited for their triumph . . . this base and pernicious crew. . . . The contemptible game lasted six months. . . .

"I held the Fascist Party firmly in my hand during this period," comments the later-day Napoleon. "I curbed the impulse of some Fascist who wanted violent reprisals, with a clear order: 'Hands in your pockets! I am the only one who must have his hands free.' In Florence and Bologna, however, there occurred episodes of extreme violence. I understood then that it was time to speak and act."

The speech came on the 3rd of January, 1925, when the situation had so completely reversed itself that Mussolini at last was able to accept and to glorify the assassination of his chief rival.

"On June 10," said Mussolini, addressing- the Black Shirts, "there was sequestered in Rome the Honorable Matteotti, who during a ride succumbed.

"This event was singularly enveloped in a certain mystery for the purpose of shocking public opinion. The Fascist revolution had been very gentle. . . . Just the same, the Honorable Matteotti, who during the war had affirmed the most dangerous principles of defeatism, after having always and everywhere offended Fascism, pronounced in the Chamber a terrible and vicious attack upon the regime. . . .

"Sentimentalism in Latin countries is very dangerous. . . .

"The sequestration of Matteotti, with its consequences, belongs morally, politically, historically to Fascism. It is useless and stupid to search for the guilty at the moment when the fact arrives. This, only this, can be the language of revolution."

When the Fascist Deputy Cesare Misuri stepped out of the party traces to declare that "Mussolini fell among bad companions," and named Rossi, Luigi Freddi, Finzi, Francesco Giunta (to which list the press added De Bono and Marinelli, four of these six being under charge of complicity in the assassination), Mussolini took cognizance and for once — that is, for a while at least — stood by his colleagues. "The men denounced as 'the bad counselors of the good tyrant,'" he said, "are five or six men who reported to me in person every morning. I herewith make distinct avowal that I look upon them as my closest collaborators and fellow burden-bearers, who share with me the salt bread of direct responsibility for the acts of the Fascist administration. I declare in your presence that I owe them the deepest sentiments of gratitude and affection."

These early days of 1925 ended the crisis. When the Rossi memorandum was published and there was a last wave of antagonism, Mussolini replied by threatening to mobilize the Fascist militia. This time it was too late for the King to mobilize the army; it would have meant civil war, and Amendola and the other leaders again talked about a general strike, which well could have been called were it not for the fear that Mussolini would use the militia against the workingmen. It became apparent that a psychological moment, that of June, could never be revived. From January, 1925, on, Fascism grew stronger than ever and its course seemed certain so long as economic pressure (which shares with violence in shaping history) did not militate against it.

The atmosphere was now clear for the Matteotti trial.

_______________

Notes:

1. The original holograph was kept by Fasciolo, the Duce's secretary.

2. Rossi's memorandum, Salvemini's translation.

3. The complete documentation for these figures, which apply to North Italy only, has been published by Bolitho.

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CHAPTER 15: Blood and Irony

ALTHOUGH THE DUCE HIMSELF SAID, "IT WAS WORSE THAN A crime, it was a blunder," the assassination of Matteotti was in fact a necessary step in the consolidation of power. With Matteotti alive Mussolini could not be certain of success. The man who sentenced the leader of the Opposition to death obeyed literally the rules for guidance of princely power as written and expounded many years ago.

The Machiavellian Prince was bitter in his victory. Above all else it was being spoiled by the wit, the humor, the irony of that other young man who, although born bourgeois and grown wealthy, stood up as a leader of the proletariat and jested over the story of the Socialist blacksmith's son who had become the champion of the steamship lines and automobile manufacturers of Milan and Turin and the tourist-promotion society of Rome.

"Remember, Razumof," says one of Conrad's characters in Under Western Eyes, "that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all devotion, of all action."

Matteotti the revolutionist loved irony; Mussolini the revolutionist had neither irony nor humor. Matteotti smiled; Mussolini frowned. Matteotti was irony's gadfly, nipping the dictator, bringing up deeply felt hatred and rage in his black glowing eyes.

He was two years younger than Mussolini. His well-to-do family sent him to Rovigo to be educated, then to the University of Bologna, where he obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence. His interest in Social- ism at first was academic. Unlike Mussolini, he suffered from no inferiority complex, no minority complex, no "suppression" by family or circumstance.

He was careful, precise, logical; he had an ordered mind and was not swayed easily by emotions. His brother, a physician and Socialist, and he discussed liberal ideas as philosophy, not as a course of action.

In 1914 Matteotti, like Mussolini, spoke for absolute neutrality. It was the duty of the proletariat, of all independent minds, of all persons having ideals, to oppose this war, any war. For several months these two men in far-removed centers preached the same thought. But Matteotti never sold out — for wealth or power or a seat in congress or a newspaper. He was arrested in June, 1916, for a speech denouncing war. After his acquittal he was drafted and remained in the army three years. Most of that time, however, he was interned in a British camp on account of his pacifist views. In 1919 and again in 1921 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he became an expert in finance and economics.

He had a fiery face, like Mussolini's, but a cold mind. His appearance was cold but flashing; he had a sensitive nature which his passionate eyes betrayed.

"Every time I saw Matteotti," says his friend, Giovanni Zibordi, "his face and figure full of energy, his movement agile, I would think of an 'espada,' a Spanish matador, one with every part of his body alert and his muscles of iron, his nerves taut and his heart unmoved, who plays with a fine blade, conquering the huge and blinded fury of the bull. . . . Such was Matteotti in the parliamentary arena, alive, prepared, vigilant, a fencer, direct and valiant, always armed with documents and with facts, with reason and with opportune blows and adequate replies.

"Irritating? Yes. He had a thin sharp voice which was not checked by sweet inflections, but a manner of speaking in a flow of irony, of logical irony — an audacious fighter."

Matteotti stood in the way of Fascist progress. His words, his pen, his activity were a daily reproach to tyranny. He had no fear of the Fascisti; the Fascist: were afraid of him. They could not answer him. They assassinated him.

Mussolini had no moral or intellectual arms to equal Matteotti's. And he simply could not live under irony. So he nodded yes to the Fascist Cheka plan of assassination.

But even after death, tragic irony played its part. The trial of Dumini and the other four confessed assassins became a trial of the dead.

It was held in March of 1926, almost two years after the murder, at a time when Fascism had so intrenched itself that nothing could shake it; it controlled the army as well as the militia now, had sup- pressed all the newspapers and corrupted the entire judiciary. Judge Giuseppe Danza presided. Chicti was chosen because it was an out-of-the-way village where the secret service could control the journalists and the proceedings easily. Co-accused with Dumini were: Albino Volpi, Amleto Poveromo, August Malacria, and Giuseppe Viola, all members of the service and all present in the automobile during the murder. Malacria had served a prison term for swindling. Poveromo had been sentenced once for robbery. Viola had a record of bankruptcy, desertion, and rape.

Roberto Farinacci, secretary-general of the Fascist Party, was appointed by Mussolini to defend the murderers. If there was one man in Italy who more than Mussolini himself was an advocate of violence in the achievement of power, that man was Farinacci, the so-called "left" or extreme hand of the Duce. The trial began with Farinacci's attack upon Matteotti. In opposing Fascism, said Farinacci, Matteotti had proven himself plainly a traitor to his country and therefore his death was justifiable. After this declaration the trial became a tragic farce.

One murderer testified that because Matteotti refused to sit quietly in the car it became necessary to subdue him. "I kneeled on his chest," he testified, "but he kept on resisting. So I pressed my knees into his chest until the arteries broke and the blood came out of his mouth."

Dumini, the American gangster, was the star witness, despite his numerous contradictions.

"When we had Matteotti in the car," he testified, "he made us all very sore by the way he thrashed about, and as we did not want to attract any attention and had determined to take him far away in the campagna, I hit him several times with the butt of my revolver.

"He then was quiet for a while, but soon started again to struggle, and when he threw the weight of his body against me while I was at the wheel, I crushed in his skull with my manganello [black-jack].

"Then when we saw that he was dead we did not know what to do next, for I had not really at first intended to kill him. We drove about for many hours and it was getting dark. Then we decided to cut up the body and burn it, and this we did in a lonesome byway near the Grotta Rossa [about twelve miles out of Rome]. What remained of the body we buried in different spots and I don't remember now where that was done."

The day following this admission the humorist Dumini changed his mind.

"We were riding along peaceably," he testified, "when suddenly Matteotti developed tuberculosis and died of a hemorrhage."

But this was a little too much for even a Fascist judge.

"Then how do you account for the thirty-six stab wounds," asked the court.

"Who said stab wounds?" demanded Dumini.

"Doctors — experts," replied the judge.

"Oh!" replied Dumini. "I thought in these modern days that 'experts' were no longer allowed to testify."

Testimony was offered that Dumini, some months previous, had been smuggled out of prison by Fascist agents, given a bag filled with 1,000-lire notes, and packed off to France. He had been recognized at the station of Termini and rearrested. A letter was found on him which again implicated Mussolini. This letter from his sister Blanche read:

"Vaselli [Dumini's lawyer] says all will be well, but it will take time on account of the judges, who are Freemasons, who war on the government and the party. They are trying to get rid of them as they did of one before. It takes time, but all will be well.

"What have you arranged for communicating with Vaselli?

"Why have you told so much to Vaselli? Why have you come to this extreme with the Duce? Do you want Rosati for defense? If you do, communicate by letter. Vaselli told us he let Mussolini know he had been betrayed. De Bono is already out. Which papers were they which concerned De Bono? It is not true what Cesarino [pet name for Cesare Rossi] said. Vaselli told mother he will make arrangements for your future with Mussolini. Do you agree? Is it true that you are taking the whole responsibility? Do not speak too much and remain where you are. Mother says the arrangements will be made as quickly as possible and a large sum will be deposited for you when you come out. Be calm. We are all interceding for you, but it is a terrible moment; nevertheless we will succeed. Kisses. Blanche."

This letter, together with the testament of Finzi and the confessions of Rossi, were not allowed in evidence.

But it is interesting to note that Dumini, the humorist, shortly afterwards walked about the streets of Rome, and when occasions came or he could make them, smilingly introduced himself: "Dumini, twelve murders." In fact, he talked too much. Bragging in the cafes of the capital of how easily he got off at Chieti and how Mussolini had stood by him so nobly, he became the object of Fascist concern. One day his demands for hush money reached their limit, for he addressed to Mussolini a legal summons, [1] in which inter alia is declared:

1. that he, Dumini, received 60,000 lire from the Directorate of the Fascist Party and

2. that the expense of the trial, 32,754 lire, was to be paid by the Fascist Party, in addition.

Dumini was arrested, tried, sentenced to a year in jail one day in September, 1926, and from that time on he has stayed in jail, in silence.

Albino Volpi, a professional assassin like Dumini, and likewise a member of the Fascist Cheka, testified:

"While we were beating and stabbing Matteotti he appeared heroic. He continued to the end to cry, 'Assassins,' 'Savages,' 'Cowards.' But he never had a weak moment and he never asked for mercy. And while we were stabbing him he kept repeating, 'Kill me, but the idea which is in me you can never kill.'

"Probably if he had been humble for a moment, and if he had asked to be saved and if he had confessed the error of his ideas, we perhaps would not have accomplished our work. But no. Just to the end, so long as he had breath, he cried out, 'My idea will not die' and 'My children will be proud of their father' and The workingmen will bless my corpse.'

"He died saying, 'Long live Socialism.'"

This is the chef-d'oeuvre of Fascist crime which the Duce was afterwards to call "a practical joke on Matteotti— he should not have resisted his jesters."

Viola and Malacria were acquitted. Dumini, Volpi, and Poveromo were found guilty of unintentional homicide, sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and freed almost immediately afterwards by Mussolini's amnesty for political offenders which had been issued in 1925. Rossi and Mussolini had reached an agreement whereby the former was to keep quiet; he was accordingly allowed to escape from prison, and from his refuge in France he turned against his chief and issued another confession and accusation, this second memorandum concluding with the words:

"All the moral responsibilities of the circle from which came the Matteotti crime are on Mussolini."

But the vendetta of Mussolini followed Rossi unrelentingly year after year, to France and Germany and Switzerland. Agents came with guns and knives and plots and secrets whispered in his ears. Rossi withstood all these. Then, in 1930, a charming lady appeared in Paris and Rossi was smitten. The lady proposed a honeymoon in lovely Switzerland, and Rossi went. He went too far. One day the lovely lady proposed an excursion to the Italian frontier, and although Rossi became a little suspicious he took great care never to come within a hundred yards of the border. But the lady made a signal and several Fascist police ran across the frontier into Switzerland, seized Rossi, and carried him off to jail. The lovely lady laughed.

Just before his trial the representative of Mussolini came to Rossi and told him that the death penalty had been ordered; if Rossi wanted to save his life he must withdraw all his confessions, especially the document commonly known as "The Thirty-seven accusations against Mussolini," and must swear never to accuse the Duce of the Matteotti murder again. To save his life Rossi withdrew everything, promised everything, and began a sentence of thirty years in prison for "libeling" Mussolini.

Marinelli and Filippelli appeared before the Court of Appeals in Rome, where on the 1st of December, 1925, the charges were dismissed because it was found that the accused had ordered the kidnapping, not the assassination, of Matteotti. General De Bono was acquitted of complicity at a trial before the Senate in July, 1925. The reason given was "lack of sufficient evidence."

It was at this time that the campaign for the suppression of the liberal press and the intimidation of foreign correspondents reached its height in Italy. Detectives followed every American journalist. The concierge of the house where the New York World correspondent lived was forced to report daily, while around the office of Emmanuel, representative of the Hearst Service, numerous spies were stationed. All the Italian journalists who acted as assistants in the American offices were ordered to report to Grandi's bureau. But special favors were shown to all members of the Cortesi family, who, representing the Associated Press of America, the London Daily Mail, the New York Times, and several other important publications, have done Fascist propaganda a greater service than all the paid agents. Without a single exception, every journalist who was not a voluntary or subsidized propagandist denounced the trial of Chieti. Even friends of Fascism did so. But no one resident in Italy dared do so in the press. During the trial John Clayton, then representing the Chicago Tribune, wrote privately:

"We are bound by the worst censorship ever imposed. We must not write anything that might reflect on the Fascisti. We are confined to an apology for political assassination. It broke my heart not to be able to report the Matteotti case as it should be done, but it would have meant arrest and expulsion from Italy."

The truth about the Matteotti trial was almost completely suppressed by the regime. But because he believed it a most unusual and cruel miscarriage of justice, Bolitho, unable to withstand the dictate of his conscience, fled from Italy when the hearings were half over and from the first free town, in France, wrote for the Manchester Guardian and the New York World a series of dispatches which startled public opinion.

A few liberals in America protested. In England Professor Gilbert Murray wrote that the tragedy at Chieti was "a mock trial in order to give absolution and public thanks to the murderers. No element of fraud was lacking; . . . the Matteotti trial will probably remain for some generations a classic model of the perfect per- version of justice."

As Bolitho, in order to escape arrest on his return to Italy, had used a pseudonym which the Fascist Cheka had been unable to identify, the head of the press bureau in the Foreign Office called in all the Anglo-American journalists for cross-examination. He even threatened those in whose papers Bolitho's syndicated articles had been used. But to the credit of those who knew the secret it must be said none betrayed him. With two exceptions, in fact, the Anglo-American press corps in Rome rejoiced over Bolitho's successful publication of the facts they themselves had been unable to send. The exceptions were the Italians who represent American and British journals and news agencies.

In defense of Mussolini, Luigi Villari, his chief apologist in London, has written that "the trial was conducted with absolute fairness and in an atmosphere free from pressure or outside influences . . . not a scrap of real evidence had emerged incriminating the government or the leaders of the Fascist Party, and all the fantastic structure erected by the Opposition has crumbled."

Professor Salvemini of course produced the documents incriminating the government, the leaders of the party, the Duce himself. The reply of Signor Villari is one of the supreme achievements of the Fascist mentality. The prosecution, he wrote, "committed Dumini and his companions for unpremeditated murder, which is not the same as manslaughter. By rejecting the charge of premeditation the alleged complicity in the murder of political personages is evidently knocked on the head."

This is typical of the apologia delivered in foreign countries a year after Mussolini, powerful, restored in confidence, accepted "the full responsibility" for the assassination.

The cynical (and not unwelcome to the Duce) viewpoint was that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. Comparing Mussolini with Napoleon, he said they differed in that the former had no military victories; they were alike in one respect; for the murder of Matteotti, Napoleon had the murder of the Duke of Enghien on his conscience.

Contrasted with the Shavian cynicism is the naivete of the lady biographers. According to Mme. Bordeux: "To accuse Mussolini openly of the murder of a member of his own parliament was next to impossible. . . . No, Mussolini was never openly accused of other than instigating the murder of Matteotti. . . . Matteotti's murder was premeditated and carried out by his own personal enemies in his own party."

Stranger still are the references to Matteotti in the long biography by Mussolini's Egeria. Whereas the Duce himself devotes thousands of words to denouncing his opponent and defending himself, Sarfatti in 352 pages of joy bells and hosannas of Fascism, slides over the thin ice of the greatest crisis in its history with two sidesteps. Page 181: "And after the assassination of Matteotti, Mussolini's first utterances in an address to the Grand Council of the Fascists was one of vehement impatience with the storm which then broke out, because it prevented him from applying himself to the task of 'ordinary administration' — the only task which he regarded as vital and essential, that of giving the people what they really wanted and were asking for, bridges, water, roads." Page 275: "He was really very much taken up by his dramatic schemes. A short time after the sinister Matteotti affair, which caused him such terrible suffering that for a while his life seemed completely wrecked, I met him going out one day looking more cheerful. He showed me a packet of manuscript, which he told me was his new play, with which he had succeeded in distracting his mind when in need of relaxation from his worries and his troubles. It was a play based on the life of the campagna, and this man, tired, exhausted, worn out by his bitter experiences, had found refreshment in recalling the incidents of his childhood." There are no other references to the assassination, the trial, or the vast results from the crisis.

In the judgment of Louis Roya, a French writer who prefaces his opinion by praising Mussolini as a patriot and friend of Latin civilization, the responsibility of the assassination "can be inferred from imponderable facts, from an ensemble of troubling circumstances, such as the letter to Dumini from his family, and finally and above all (this is the thesis of Rossi contre the Duce) from the orders for violence given by Mussolini. Seen from that viewpoint, the culpability of Mussolini is irrefutable in the eyes of the universal moral conscience. And, a thing most impressive, all Italians who have fled from Italy to escape the Fascist tyranny, unite in recognizing that the first and the highest responsibility rests on Mussolini: that too is the opinion of the international proletariat.

"There can be no doubt about it that when the day comes when Fascism falls, the Matteotti trial, the real trial, will begin again; and the principal accused will be — Mussolini."

_______________

Notes:

1. Registered in the courts of Rome, Bureau of Private Orders, No. 5555, Vol. 356.

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CHAPTER 16: The Sons of Brutus

GIOVANNI AMENDOLA INHERITED THE LEADERSHIP OF THE FIVE Opposition parties commonly known as the Aventine.

If Matteotti had been the Brutus of the Fascist regime, Amendola was the son of Brutus, He was one of the leading intellectuals of Italy, a savant, one of the ideal university men who had given up a cloistered career for politics and journalism and yet had found time for serious and learned creative work. He was brilliant, and like Matteotti he frequently employed irony in his unanswerable attacks on Fascism and illegal violence.

Shortly after the assassination of Matteotti many men said that Amendola would be the next to die. In fact, the first threat against his life had been made by Mussolini a year earlier when he wrote: [1]

"The Deputy Amendola demands why we do not suppress the national militia at a time when Fascism has general approval.

'To this gentleman, who again promenades himself in the streets of Rome without annoyances, we reply that the militia is not prepared against the people, but, on the contrary, against a minority of scoundrels, very vicious, without credit, scoundrels who have always betrayed Italy.

"This Amendola who craves liberty, just as if all the pits of Italy were full of cadavers, and all the lamp-posts decorated with anti-nationalist carcasses, has, up to now, enjoyed too much liberty.

"Fascism has been too generous to him, as it has been to other delinquents whose names are Nitti, Albertini, Don Sturzo, Treves, Modigliani, Serrati, Turati, and others. [Every man mentioned, except Albertini, has either been beaten up, arrested, or forced into exile, since then.]

"Ah, if Fascism, instead of being so good and so naive, had done away with all these scoundrels who infest the nation! Fascism today is paying for its faults for having made a revolution with the blood of its soldiers instead of the blood of its adversaries.

"But, for this reason, to repair this first omission, the militia must remain at its post; the militia would do well to give a lesson to the scoundrels who have not already been nailed to lamp-posts."

The militia and also the Fascist university students and the squadristi gave Amendola, "this Amendola who craves liberty," not one but several lessons. This is the records of the assaults:

December 26, 1923, in a crowded street in Rome.

March, 1924, in Naples during a political speech.

May 30, 1924, on leaving the House of Parliament.

April 6, 1925, in Rome, after a speech on liberty.

July 20, 1925, at Montecatini, in Tuscany.

The first attack occurred in the Via Francesco Crispi while hundreds were passing. Many noticed that an automobile filled with militiamen was slowly following Amendola and they knew that an assault was planned. The militiamen finally stopped the car a few feet ahead of the Deputy, leaped out, drove the passers-by away, and beat Amendola with their clubs, leaving him with his head bloody, apparently dying on the sidewalk. Adjutant-major Vico Perroni of the 112th Legion of Fascist militia, later testified under oath that the order to attack Amendola came from General De Bono, who was head both of the militia and of the Rome police. He asked whether the order came direct from the Duce. "I was impressed with the mention of Amendola's name," reads his signed confession, "so I personally made sure that His Excellency Mussolini required this to be done. Discussions followed with His Excellency General De Bono, who was particular in directing that Signor Amendola was merely to be clubbed."

The high court of justice which tried De Bono for complicity in this and other cases, was the Fascist Senate; in its findings, it states that it is true that the two carabinieri posted to safeguard Amendola were mysteriously recalled the day of the attack, that many persons saw the miltiamen preparing the attack, that it is a fact that the attackers fled to the militia barracks at Magnanapoli, and that the chauffeur, Zaccagnini, spoke to Colonel Candelori about De Bono as the official who had sanctioned the crime. But the court found insufficient evidence; this ground, in Italy, however, is in itself an accusation, for the law states that persons so freed must never hold government office, but as this was a pre-Fascist law, merely a constitutional law, Mussolini defied public opinion by appointing De Bono governor of Tripoli the night of the verdict.

The young Fascist squadristi gathered outside the offices of Amendola's newspaper, Il Mondo, and sang:

"Amendola, Amendola devi morire
E col pugnale che abbiamo affilato
Amendola, Amendola devi morire"

["Amendola, Amendola you must die
By the stiletto which we have sharpened
Amendola, Amendola you must die."]

When this Opposition leader planned to speak in the province of Caserta, the Fascist Deputy Greco obtained an advance copy of the speech and took the text to Rossi, who took it to Mussolini. The Duce then told Greco that the Amendola demonstration must be stopped at any price. It was.

Ten days later, on leaving the Chamber, Amendola and his friends were again attacked by Fascist militia. As Amendola carried an umbrella that day, he defended himself, while the militia, although outnumbering the liberal Deputies five to one, ran away. The next afternoon the Fascist Deputies offered a resolution asking that parliamentary immunity be suspended so that Amendola could be arrested for assaulting a Fascist militia chief.

One can well believe that Amendola with an umbrella was the equal of five. He was an enormous man, about six feet high, huge but not fat, muscular and vivacious. I never spoke to him. Although I interviewed all the leaders of the Fascist government in 1925, I particularly refrained from trafficking with the Opposition, knowing that the Foreign Office would look upon such action as treason. As it was, my telegrams regarding Amendola resulted in Mussolini's protests to our ambassador, our Mr. Fletcher, who in Mexico had shaken his fist when Carranza imprisoned an American journalist, but who, in Italy, preferred to act "diplomatically."

What I reported were the circumstances of the attempted assassination of July 20, 1925, when Amendola, already a sick man, left secretly at midnight for Montecatini for a rest cure. When Amendola arrived at the Hotel Pace there were one thousand armed Fascists waiting to kill him. Some of them had traveled twenty miles. All of them, as I learned and cabled, had received an alerte from the Rome Cheka headquarters which was in the same building with the militia offices, and orders had been given to the squadristi of several towns.

At first the hotel proprietor refused to surrender his guest; the Fascists then stormed the building, invading the rooms of Italians and foreigners, smashing down resisting doors, threatening with death all who stood in their way. Amendola, however, had fled in his car. An official offered him protection, but when they had ridden several miles, betrayed the chief. Several automobiles filled with Fascisti arrived and twenty men clubbed Amendola, leaving him for dead in his car. This is what I had reported. Amendola suffered agony until April 7, 1926, when he died of his wounds in southern France.

To his deathbed he called his friend Campolonghi and said:

"The Fascisti have abolished parliament, and so I have lost my liberty of speech. They have abolished the liberty of the press and so I can no longer write. They have assassinated me and so I have lost the liberty to live. All this is nothing. The evil is that they will end by assassinating Italy."

The death certificate shows Amendola died of clotting of the blood in his lungs, the result of clubbing. As a racketeer's crime it was perfect: they do not want to kill outright like their Chicago brethren.

Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia congratulated the squadristi.

In the case of Gobetti, the complicity of the chief Fascist condottiere is more clearly proven.

Gobetti was only twenty-five. In Turin he published a periodical called The Liberal Revolution, satirizing Mussolini, irritating Mussolini again. But there was not a word in Gobetti's irony which, if read in court, would sound libelous or insulting and the Duce could find absolutely no ground for suppressing the paper. Gobetti was ambushed and severely beaten. But he recovered and continued his satire. In January, 1924, Mussolini sent the following telegram to the prefect of police of Turin: [2]

Prefect Turin I am told that Gobetti went to Paris recently but actually is in Sicily. Please inform me precisely. See to it again that life is made difficult for this stupid opponent of the Fascist government.

Mussolini.

Gobetti's office was pillaged, his possessions requisitioned, his correspondence stolen, his paper suppressed, and finally the prefect issued an order denying him the right to exercise the profession of journalist, his one means of making a living. The Fascist again beat up their victim and he fled to France, where, like Amendola, he died of lung trouble.

Further evidence is given by Guido Narbone, former vice-secretary of the Turin Fascisti, who writes proudly that when he and other leaders of Torinese Fascism were received by Mussolini at the Palazzo Chigi, the Duce said:

"You must act fascistically and with the maximum energy. You know Professor Gobetti in Turin? He needs a severe Fascist lesson. You are charged to give it to him."

Criticism, humor, irony — Mussolini could not withstand these forces, especially when they were employed by men of intelligence and power. The politicians, the scholars, the writers, and the journalists who attacked Mussolini with words were in turn "eliminated from circulation" or, in American slang, "put on the spot" by the student of Machiavelli.

Among the few left who dared use their voices were one or two of the great heroes of the war, and most notable among them was that same Raffaele Rossetti who, to aid d'Annunzio, had brought to Mussolini's office the enormous fund with which the nation had re- warded him.

But Rossetti, Italy's greatest war hero, was made a pacifist by his experiences in the war. He was opposed to all bloodshed. And as he watched Fascism consolidate its power by that means he became an anti-Fascist. The story of Mussolini's wrath is told in Part XII of Rossi's memorandum:

"In the spring of 1923 a Fascist ceremony took place at which, I think at Rapallo, certainly in the eastern Riviera, General De Vecchi was present. Among the onlookers was Signor Rossetti, one of the men who were awarded the gold medal for bravery during the war. He was a bitter opponent of Fascism. Although not provoked, he thought it good to arouse the anger of the majority of the crowd by calling out, 'Long live free Italy' and 'Down with Fascism.' The next day Mussolini complained of the long suffering of the Fascists of the region and expressed his astonishment that Signor De Vecchi had allowed such provocation to pass without prompt punishment. He remarked: 'Signor Rossetti, gold medal or no gold medal, was there to give provocation. Therefore, without further ado he should have been struck down dead on the spot.'"

Inasmuch as the Fascisti had failed to strike Rossetti dead, Mussolini ordered them to arrest the hero, and this was done. Rossetti, however, managed to escape from Genoa in a rowboat; he was wrecked in the Mediterranean, but dragged, more dead than alive, on to the beach at Nice, and today he is setting type in a Paris publication devoted to attacking the Fascist regime.

The physical and moral incapability of the Fascisti to tolerate criticism is called by Rossi "the fundamental fault" of the party in power; "this mentality is the key to the political tragedy of the Italian nation." In the view of H. G. Wells "the deadliest thing about Fascism is its systematic and ingenious and complete destruction of all criticism and critical opposition. It is leaving no alternative government in the land. It is destroying all hopes of recovery. The King may some day be disinterred, the Vatican may become audible again, the Populist Party of Catholic Socialism hangs on; but it is hard to imagine any of these three vestiges of the earlier state of affairs recovering enough vitality to reconstruct anew the shattered and exhausted Italy. Fascism is holding up the whole apparatus of thought and education in Italy, killing or driving out of the country every capable thinker, clearing out the last nests of independent expression in the universities. Meanwhile, its militant gestures alarm and estrange every foreign power with which it is in contact."

Men of good will, like Mr. Wells, may deplore the course of the regime and counsel the Duce to other methods. But he remains under the influence of the cynic of Realpolitik, the philosopher of dictatorship, Machiavelli, who wrote: "He who creates a tyranny and does not kill Brutus and he who creates a Free State and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will endure but a short time."

This is the guide-book to power which Mussolini read and underlined in his youth. It explains his present success.

_______________

Notes:

1. Popolo d'Italia, August 24, 1923.

2. The original, in Mussolini's handwriting, was saved by his secretary and afterwards published.

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CHAPTER 17: Purge of the Freemasons

AFTER PERSONAL VENDETTA HAD PASSED ITS CRISIS, AFTER BRUTUS and the sons of Brutus had been "eliminated from circulation" in the brilliant euphemism of the Duce, there still remained, in addition to the impotent Opposition parties whose slogan forever was "No violence is ever justifiable," one formidable element of danger to the consolidation of the Fascist regime. This was Freemasonry.

In 1925 all the journalists resident in Rome, and notably the American, British, Scandinavian, and others who came from Protestant nations, were collectively and individually lectured by the Fascist diplomats concerning a decree Mussolini had prepared which would abolish secret organizations. We realized it was an attack on Masonry and the Foreign Office admitted it. But in this instance, we were informed, the Duce was for once doing something consistent with his past. Had he not attacked Freemasonry in 1914, when he was a Socialist, declaring that membership in both organizations was incompatible? Today it was the same with Fascism. When we asked why this was so, the answer was, "Because Masonry is a common enemy." When we protested that so far as we knew Masonry did not interfere with a man's politics, the spokesman for Mussolini explained further.

"You Americans and British," said he to the group of which I was a member, "do not realize that your Masonry and ours are as different as the tropics and the poles. Your Freemasons are all of the Scottish Rite; ours are all of the Grand Orient. While it may be true that these two organizations have relations in common, fundamentally they are different. Your Masonry is decent; it keeps out of politics, out of dirty intrigue; ours is nothing but an intriguing organization, undermining the army and the State; yours does not fight the Catholic Church, ours exists mainly for that purpose. Our Masonry is the secret enemy of the government; it is a plot against the government. Mussolini shows his consistency in always attacking Masonry, that is, Grand Orient Freemasonry."

The world press swallowed this propaganda. Every journalist cabled the viewpoint of the Fascist! and believed it. Some of them were members of the Scottish Rite. Never having had any connection with Masonry myself and, at that time, naive enough to accept the word of all government officials as authoritative, I did likewise. It was a great surprise to me, later, to find in the official expressions of leaders and the official publications of the Order in Britain and America views completely denying the tenets of the Fascist statesmen.

However, in 1925, I did learn from the Vatican that Mussolini's decree, which did not name the Masons specifically, but abolished all secret organizations, had troubled and chagrined the Pope. The Catholic Church, I was told, was opposed to the new law. First of all, the Church was not fighting Masonry in Italy and was not the secret instigator of the decree, as had been hinted by some Fascists; secondly, the Pope realized that the law as promulgated in its ambiguous manner, could just as easily be used for the destruction of the Order of Jesuits. These views I also cabled.

Of Mussolini's rare consistency in attitude towards the Masons, the explanation is now quite simple. The Order, since its foundation, has always been a refuge for men who believed in individual and political liberty; it has always opposed dictatorship in any form, Socialist or Bolshevist or Fascist; it has always favored a constitutional government, and since the day Garibaldi impressed it with his great personal seal, it has remained the standard-bearer of freedom. That is why the most rabid of radicals, Benito Mussolini of 1914, sought to destroy it and why the most reactionary of dictators, Benito Mussolini of 1925, finally did so.

The Duke of Middlesex established the first lodge in Italy in 1773. Under warrant of the Grand Lodge of England he came to Florence and soon after the foundation, there was considerable papal opposition. In 1862 the Grand Orient of Italy was organized, and upon reorganization some eleven years later, it began to be a power. That there was antagonism between Italian Masonry and the Vatican is only too true. A writer in the Masonic News, an American publication, states that "owing to religious and political conditions in Italy it was almost impossible for the Grand Orient to remain outside of politics." The reason was simple: "On the one side was the Roman Catholic Church, always seeking to destroy it; on the other side was a government, suspicious of secret societies, which in Europe nearly always have a revolutionary purpose and liable at any time to fall under the control of the Vatican."

Garibaldi and Mazzini, founders of the New Italy, were both grand masters. The former addressed a letter to a general assembly in Naples, June 17, 1867, saying:

"Masonry being the oldest bulwark of liberty and justice and therefore the true antagonist of the papacy, which is the antithesis of progress and civilization, I implore all my brothers of all the Italian lodges to assist the poor Romans, oppressed by the immoral domination of the harsh enemy of Italy and Humanity." And of course it was Garibaldi who uttered the exclamation "The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy."

The Freemasons, however, never did ally themselves with the radical movement in Italy, despite the anti-Vatican attitude of the latter; Masonry was religious and Christian, while the extreme radicals, of whom Mussolini, then the apostle of atheism, was the leader, were not only anti-papal but Antichrist.

When Fascism, under the atheist Duce, later began its punitive expeditions against its radical enemies, it found unexpected support in Freemasonry, and for many years, despite the suppression of the facts by the Fascisti, there was a brotherly understanding between the two organizations. From the time the first Fasci were formed until after the march on Rome Masonic lodges cooperated, went so far as to organize Fascist locals and to join the employers in subsidizing Mussolini. Professor Salvemini states that the amount of money they gave the Duce and his generals to assist in the capture of Rome was 3,500,000 lire, or $175,000. Signor Domizio Torrigiani, then grand master, published in November, 1922, a few days after Mussolini became Prime Minister, a declaration of confidence in the new government and in Fascist principles. It was not until the new party had been in power for almost a year, and when the necessity of a rapprochment with the Vatican began to impose itself, for purely opportunistic reasons, that the estrangement occurred.

Then events moved quickly— from the passage of laws to actual massacre.

First of all the decree which abolished the freedom of the press, the sine qua non of all Fascist repression, was of particular importance because many great and liberal papers were owned, edited, and supported by Freemasons. The journalist Mussolini realized that so long as he could not muzzle them he could not destroy them, and the decree which followed the Matteotti assassination silencing all opposition, silenced the Masons also. In 1925 the branch of the Grand Orient in Florence, the spiritual headquarters of the Order, realizing that Mussolini had begun his plans for a treaty with the Vatican and that the press muzzle was directed against it as well as the five political parties, began a violent campaign in the press. The Fascisti replied by seizing the Florence press club. Newspapers were suppressed, some were bought, editors were beaten up and all precautions taken to hold the massacre with as little publicity and opposition as possible. Freemason judges, magistrates, officials, were forced to resign, and in some instances bankers were replaced with enemies of Masonry.

Then the whispering began. In the cafes of Florence the Fascisti sat around and whispered about coming trouble, while in other cafes the Masons gathered to discuss the sinister whispers. At first they would not believe that any real danger to their lives was imminent; there would be the usual Fascist excesses, the burning of newspapers, the destruction of clubs, the clubbing of leaders, perhaps a few knife wounds and some revolver-shots were probable, but a massacre, never.

Then the atmosphere changed. "We must do all the good we can to our friends and must inflict all the harm possible on our enemies," said Mussolini. "Now as Masonry has fought us, as it has given us trouble, as it has attempted to split and divide us and as it has in certain cities succeeded in creating dissensions more than usually idiotic because of their underground origins, for all these reasons, even if there were no others, we are within our plain and sacrosanct right to defend ourselves and to proceed to the attack, because, as you are teaching me, the best defense consists in an attack."

These veiled words were followed with a notice to the press from the Fascist Directory. It is generally understood to have been written by Mussolini himself, but this has never been affirmed or denied. As it appeared in the Battaglia Fascisti it read:

"The Fascist Council assumes complete responsibility for the holy actions of retaliation and violence, performed by the Fascisti, even the slightest, and commands that every Fascist should endeavor to identify those unworthy Italians affiliated with Masonry so as to be able to know better what are the most useful means in order to accomplish a radical, a decisive punitive action.

"The fight against Masonry continues with a great intensity. The enemy is more ready, more prepared than before. The fight against Masonry is a fight to a finish and there is only one possible program:

"Masonry must be destroyed and Masons should have no right to citizenship in Italy. To reach this end all means are good, from the club to the gun, from the breaking of windows to the purifying fire. In one word, no avenue of escape should be left open to Masonry. . . . The Masons must be ostracized. Each and every one of their acts or movements must be stopped. Their very life must be made impossible."

The phrases "to render life difficult," to "make life impossible" for an enemy and "to remove from circulation," were well understood. The followers needed no explanation.

The massacre of the Freemasons of Florence began on the 26th of September and lasted until the 4th of October, 1925. There were at least 300 casualties and the number of dead has been estimated between 50 and 137. The order came from Rome. The massacre was not the usual wild debauch of bloodshed which characterized other Fascist "reprisals," but a highly organized, carefully planned military attack, with its objective in lives and property. "I have the names of every man in Italy inscribed on the rolls of Masonry," Mussolini had said, and the chief of the Florence Black Shirts had a list of the persons marked for death. Eighteen men were systematically murdered.

The Fascist squads, dressed in their uniforms, carrying banners and singing the "Song of Youth," went rioting in the streets (it is so strange that the thousands of our tourists who sing the praises of law and order and the trains running on time, these thousands who fled from Florence that week, have never said a word about the affair); the Fascisti looted shops, cracked safes, stopped innocent persons and felled them with their blackjacks.

Thirteen lawyers and notaries had their offices destroyed. All were Masons. One clinic was destroyed. The apartments of the Socialist Deputies Targetti and Baldesi were looted and burned. The Fascisti entered the home of one Becciolini, and during the riot he killed one of them. They returned in force, lynched him, dragged his body into the public square, and exposed it there as a warning. Cafes were looted, wine and spirits flowed in the streets, eager Fascist youth drank itself drunk and staggered. Houses were set on fire. In the week of rioting were heard the cries:

"Viva Mussolini! Viva Dumini! (My name is Dumini, twelve assassinations!)"

One of the most savage incidents was the assassination of the Socialist Deputy Gaetano Pilati, war hero and cripple. Pilati's widow tells the tragic story: [1]

"The assassination of my husband had been decided a long time in advance. I learned later from the cafe-keeper Pietro Serpieri, who lives opposite us, that during the month of September, 1925, my husband had been followed constantly by a young man. This man was able to inform himself on the location of our bedroom.

"The night of October 3rd a Fascist named Lupporini was killed when he entered, with a gun in his hand and followed by another militiaman, into the home of an old Freemason for the purpose of killing him. The Fascists, after having killed Benciolini, the presumed murderer of their fallen companion, organized more reprisals. Anti-Fascists were tracked down, their studies and their shops were sacked, their homes burned.

"It was almost midnight when several inhabitants of my quarter saw a black automobile, lights out, stop about 500 meters from our house. A dozen persons descended. One, drawing his revolver, stayed to guard the chauffeur. The others went along the Africo, obliging all whom they met to run. In the street Fratelli Dandolo, where our house was, many were at their windows, watching the burning of the furniture of the Honorable Baldesi which had been thrown into the street. The Fascists fired several shots in the air, summoning all to withdraw. This did not stop anyone, the lights being out, to follow events in the street and in our house, by looking through the shutters.

"That evening my husband returned late after paying his workmen, and after dining, retired, being very weary. We slept so soundly neither heard nor perceived what happened in the street.

"Suddenly we were awakened by a great noise. I lighted the room. Before us was a man, small, sinister, with a hat over his eyes. He brandished two revolvers. A second person, who had also entered our room, approached my husband and in a menacing voice said, 'Dress and follow me to Fascist headquarters.'

"'I will follow you,' replied my husband, and seated on the bed began to put on his trousers on the one leg he had left after the war.

"'Come quickly,' said the Fascist. 'Are you really Pilati?'

"'Yes.'

"Hardly had he said that word when the two bandits discharged their revolvers at him.

"After receiving the first shot in his left shoulder, my husband rolled from the bed to the door, either because he wanted to leave the bed so as not to expose me to more shots, or to block the door to our son's room.

"Maddened by terror, I screamed.

"At the open window suddenly appeared the sinister figure of a third bandit.

"I heard another shot, and the man who had already spoken cried, 'Quick, quick, let us depart.'

"He had hardly gone when my husband, groaning painfully, said to me: 'Look, look, how many wounds. Give me a bandage.'

"Another tenant saw the bandits flee. One of them, while the chauffeur was blowing his horn for all to return, proposed to them: 'Let's go have a drink on me. I was the one who killed him, you know.'

"My husband was taken on a stretcher to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, To the porter who asked what had happened to him he replied:

"'The Austrians have mutilated me; the Italians have murdered me.'

"After three days of agony he breathed his last . . . the funeral, by order of the police, was held secretly.

"In March, 1926, during the hearing, I was confronted with Ermini, who was defended by the attorney Meschiari. I, however, was unable to find an attorney to take the case. I recognized without hesitation, one of the assassins.

"When the day came for the trial I was the victim of all sorts of pressure and threats for the purpose of making me deny the identity of Ermini. I was offered much money, which I refused with indignation.

"I asked for passports for myself and my son. I was told I would get them if I would give up going to the trial. Everyone was organized to conquer my resistance, the Attorney Pacchi, the Colonel Lanari, the Deputy Delcroix, the prefect.

"Finally the attorney who had charge of my interests was summoned by the prefecture and by the Fascio to abandon me.

"I had to resign myself to do without assistance.

"The trial began in Chieti at the end of April. I was exhausted, sick, I was in bed. But the fear of betraying my dead husband by my absence gave me a new strength.

"At the trial I was veritably attacked by the lawyers. But I remained firm and confirmed my identification of Ermini.

"The assassins were acquitted. At Florence they posted police at my house. The assassins returned to my quarter, amusing themselves by coming under the windows and insulting me."

The listing of Masonic leaders and their destruction was partly the work of the head of the Florentine Fascio, Luporini, who, as fate would have it, was accidentally shot in a scuffle. It was the death of Luporini which supplied the immediate reason for holding the massacre in September.

On Sunday, October 4th, so many British, American, and other foreign citizens had been clubbed and robbed that the terrified tourists fled to the consulates for refuge. The American, British, and Swiss consuls raised their flags, as if for a holiday or for a war, the frightened nationals poured into the diplomatic buildings, and the consuls telegraphed their protests directly to Mussolini. It was the next day that Farinacci sent word to Florence, "Cease hostilities."

More than a week of rioting and murder and hardly a word in the foreign press about a state of revolution in one of the most beautiful and popular tourist centers of Europe. For Fascist censorship it was a great success. The cables were stopped in the post-offices, telegrams to Paris held up, letters opened, the foreign journalists held almost incommunicado. Then the Fascist press bureau began issuing statements which the venal Stefani agency, the Italian journalists representing the American papers, and some leading but betrayed American and British reporters, accepted as true and sent out. In these Fascist reports it was stated that the Masons and the Socialists had attacked a Fascist without warning and killed him, that the mob demanded vengeance and acted without authority. The government then pacified the city.

It was more than a week after the massacre before the honest journalists saw that the official reports were not true, but then it was too late to send out sensational news; the matter was now historical — and therefore dead. The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme later sent its protest:

"The savage onslaught on Masonry now organized at Mussolini's instigation is nothing more than a move to use these artificially provoked sanguinary upheavals as a plea for indefinitely putting off the date of the Matteotti trial: because Mussolini knows that the public hearing of the evidence in court it will not be possible for him to prevent the disclosure of his own direct personal participation in the atrocious crime, as having given the order to the murderers."

But that was not news, either.

A correspondent was invited to ask Mussolini questions about the massacre of the Freemasons. "Could your Excellency explain the reason for the Fascist war on Masonry?" His Excellency could:

"I am very glad you asked that question because there is a lot of misunderstanding in Anglo-Saxon countries over this question. We must once and for all make clear the great difference between English and American Masonry and the political Masonry of Italy. . . . Italian Masons have nothing in common with English Masons except the name. . . . The work of Masonry on behalf of our independence has been much exaggerated.

"The sect must be absolutely abolished because its influence is deleterious to discipline in the army, to the impartiality of the courts, and a subversion of order that should obtain in all public offices. Masonry has overturned all regulations. . . .

"Fortunately, Fascism has struck Italian Masonry such a blow that it will be difficult for it to regain its legs again for some time. . . . The grave attempt on my life on the anniversary of our glorious victory, and the plot to throw the whole nation into disorder, show what a sinister influence the Masonic sect — which undoubtedly inspired the criminal attempt on my life — has on the minds even of Italians who, because of their social position and past military experience, ought to he better able to understand the folly and shame of this latest exploit."

This "latest exploit" to which Mussolini refers is the Zaniboni plot which will be told in due time. William Bird, the noted journalist from Paris where he was free of censorship quoted one of Mussolini's admirers as informing him that "either Mussolini is rapidly going mad or else the worst elements among his entourage have so completely dominated him that he is longer free to act according to his own judgment. This so-called plot is too obviously trumped up to deceive anybody. It was intended simply as a pretext for dissolving the United Socialist Party and for closing the Masonic lodges."

The other point emphasized by Mussolini in his interview, the difference between the Scottish Rite and the Grand Orient types of Masonry is further shot to pieces by John Bond of the Fellowship Forum, who tells what happened to the Scottish lodge at the time the Fascists were killing the Masons of Florence. He states:

"In Rome the Masons of the Scottish Rite had their offices in the great palace right opposite the church of the Jesuits. . . . While a meeting of the lodge was in progress, Mussolinian thugs armed with cudgels broke down the doors, beat the members of the lodge, and then set fire to the premises. ... No mention was made in the Roman newspapers.

"Commendatore Raoul Palermi, the Grand Master of the Scottish Rite, well-known to leading Masons all over the world, a scholar and a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, had to give up his home in Rome, as several attempts had been made to break in and set it on fire. He had been spared in the general massacre because he enjoyed the esteem of men who were close to the King. ... He was 'advised' by the prefect of the Roman police to leave Rome . . . and went to a little town near Palermo. . . . One morning he was found unconscious in his writing-room, stabbed. The police gave out a statement to his friends (no news of the fact was permitted to appear in the press) that the wounds seemed to have been self- inflicted. Happily they were not fatal."

It is an obvious fact that the Scottish Rite was suppressed in Italy, and it is another obvious fact that Fascist propaganda has not only ignored this, but perverted the news for the press. Mussolini frequently has come to his own defense with vast vague attacks. Thus on one occasion he links Masonry with Bolshevism when he speaks of "Italy's imps, the red dabblers, our organization of so-called Freemasons." Again he resorts to his habitual characteristic methods of using foul language; thus he cautions us not to forget that "this shady institution with its secret nature has always had in Italy a character typical of the briber and the blackmailer . . . the Masons of Italy have always represented a distortion, not only in political life, but in spiritual concepts. ... Its secret character throughout the twentieth century, its mysterious meetings, abhorrent to our beautiful communities with their sunlight and their love of truth, gave to the sect the character of corruption, a crooked concept of life, without program, without soul, without moral value. . . . For my direct, methodical, consistent course of policy the hate of the Masonic sect persecutes me even now. . . . This is a war without quarter, a war of which I am a veteran. ... I have always had against me our Masonry. But that organization, which in other times was very powerful, has been beaten by me. Against me it did not and cannot win. Italians won this battle for me. They found the cure for this leprosy. ... I obeyed the positive command of my conscience, and not any opportunism. My attitude had nothing in common with the anti-Masonic spirit of the Jesuits."

And finally he speaks of the "corrupting, sinister, tortuous power as that of international Masonry of a political type, as distinguished from the Masonry known in the Anglo-Saxon countries." But here again a question of veracity arises. For despite all the Duce's efforts to distinguish between the two Masonries, an effort which for a while deceived the foreign press and aided in the apology for the massacre of Florence, we find that the Scottish Rite has everywhere stood by the Grand Orient. Thus, in the official organ of the Supreme Council 33° A. & A. Scottish Rite of Freemasonry S. J., U. S. A. the blood bath of Florence was denounced in this editorial opinion:

"The millions of Masons throughout the world at the present can only look on, impotent for the time being, to help their oppressed brethren in Italy, but their distress awakens the deepest sympathy. Masons of the world, especially the three millions of the Craft in this country, are well aware of the issues involved and their hearts vibrate with compassion for their suffering brethren overseas.

"There can be no doubt of the ultimate result. For the time the tyrant prospers. . . . The despot must fall, the wrong be dethroned and righteousness come to victory. In that day Freemasonry in Italy will be vindicated. It will be seen that the Craft has been the victim of malicious slander and that the people of Italy have no better friends than the men who wear the apron of the Masonic Order."

According to an American masonic investigation, the Fascisti destroyed 1,000 lodges and clubs, pillaging most of them, throwing the emblems into the street or auctioning them off with a ribald ceremony, and burning what they could not dispose of otherwise.

Grand master of the Grand Orient Domizio Torrigiani was deported to the isle of Ponza; General Luigi Capello, once commander of the Italian Second Army, was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment and became convict No. 3246; General Roberto Bencivenga, former chief of the general staff of General Cadorna, was also deported to Ponza.

Whether Masonry was guilty of anti-Fascist activities cannot be answered definitely. One fact is certain: from the time the Masons of Italy ceased to give money and moral support to Fascism, from the time they saw Fascism assume all authority and realized that Mussolini was waging war against the lodges and their leaders, they began to draw to themselves all those who hoped for another risorgimento. Garibaldi had once called Masonry his bulwark of liberty; perhaps some new leader, some new Matteotti or Amendola, would join with Masonry and under the banner of the Aventine Opposition rally all elements for another battle of restoration of personal and public rights. So Masons thought in 1925. In destroying Masonry, therefore, Mussolini destroyed the one great secret habitat of a possible future enemy, an enemy which might prove dangerous to his soaring will to maintain himself throughout his lifetime in full and absolute power.

_______________

Notes:

1. In Liberta, Paris, July 24, 1927.

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CHAPTER 18: Mussolini Conquers the Mafia

AMONG THE MINOR FORCES DANGEROUS TO THE PROGRESS OF Fascism was the Mafia, the secret terroristic organization which was particularly active in Sicily and the southern provinces. This menace Mussolini met and in his typical way conquered. It is one of the achievements most loudly and universally acclaimed in the press.

Especially vociferous are the paean singers in America, where, during the great and golden era of Prohibition, a system closely allied to the Mafia flourished in the big cities and took its toll of millions if not billions of dollars. Racketeering is not yet dead in America. But few realize how closely allied it is to the Italian system.

In the early 1920's the present writer employed as his assistant in Rome an Italian journalist named Camillo Cianfarra, who had for many years served in the Italian diplomatic service and who had made a survey of Italian emigrant activities in the United States. Part of his work was to investigate crime in the United States, to watch, study, and report on the number of Italians engaged in criminal activities, so that the records in their home towns to which they frequently returned could he kept efficiently.

When Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune asked the Rome bureau to investigate the question of Italian predominance in Chicago racketeering, Cianfarra naturally undertook this work. His explanation of Italian criminality in America was simple and frank. In Sicily, in the old days, he had found that the judges made it a point to encourage habitual criminals, cut-throats, murderers, and bandits to emigrate to America. As this was before Mussolini restored capital punishment, it was found cheaper to deport murderers and gunmen than sentence them to life imprisonment and feed them in Italy. When a murderer appeared before a Sicilian judge the latter would say, well, it's life imprisonment for you, and the sentence will be pronounced Thursday morning. That is, if you are here. But there is a boat for New York on Wednesday.

And that is how many of Italy's worst citizens came to America. But when American laws were passed aimed most directly at that country, and a few American consuls took seriously the State Department's orders for selective emigration, the result was that bandits had a hard time getting to the United States.

Under these circumstances Mussolini had a brilliant idea. He found that in reality there were two big secret terror organizations called indiscriminately the Mafia. The one protected the countryside, the other the city, the one levied tribute on farmers, the other on urban merchants, and among themselves they fought. Everyone was a victim. If a peasant wanted to take a bullock-load of vegetables into Naples or Palermo he had to pay a small percentage to some gangster who would assure him "safety" on the trip both ways and his money. Likewise city merchants were mulcted. Sicily saw the origin of all the beer and movie and pants-pressing rackets of Chicago and it happened generations ago.

Mussolini soon realized that the urban Mafia was far superior to the rural Mafia. S. S. McClure, one of Mussolini's best apologists in America, believed that Sicily was "under a tyranny of the worst and most powerful criminal oligarchy that ever existed," making the American urban system of murder, robbery, blackmail, kidnapping, and other forms of violence "mild" in comparison. In the province of Palermo there were 1,750 murders in one year: Chicago would have to have 7,000 murders a year in place of 300 to equal it.

These thousands of Mafiosi, who for half a century had become a great power in the American underworld, who had established the Black Hand system in the Italian colonies in New York, Chicago, and other large centers, and who were later to take the leadership in bootlegging and racketeering, were now doomed to remain in Italy.

To meet the situation Mussolini appointed the Honorable Carnazza governor of Sicily and sent Cesare Mori to Palermo as prefect.

Some forty years ago Mori, an artillery officer, entered the police department as a delegate, the lowest rank, and began his new career in Trapani, which, with Palermo, shared the reputation of being the centers of Mafia activities. His chief work was rounding up the cattle-maimers whose specialty was hamstringing the livestock of landowners who refused to pay their "contributions." It was racketeering in its purest Chicago form.

So successful was Mori that he gained advancement and medals for courage, military, and civil valor. When Nitti was made Prime Minister he gave Mori the highest rank, quaestor in Rome.

In 1923, when Mussolini had been in power almost a year, the leading urban business men of Sicily came to Rome with the request that Mori be sent back to command the forces against the Mafia. Naturally enough, these prominent gentlemen who had contributed liberally to the Fascist cause wanted their business protected by the new government, instead of the bandits who were preaching "the pernicious doctrine that the police and the law were the enemies of the common people," and who were extremely active in levying a tax on the wealthy city merchants.

Mori, who did not play politics, went to work as a soldier; but Carnazza, who was a Fascist politician, carried out orders from Rome.

Mussolini, adding a new twist to the axiom, divesa et impera, ordered that a distinction be made between the city and the rural bandits; the former, which was the larger section, was armed and given moral encouragement, while the latter division was proscribed. Under these circumstances country banditry soon disappeared.

Mussolini then incorporated the urban branch of the Mafia into the Black Shirt militia. According to Don Sturzo it was the Honorable Carnazza who in addition to all their other weapons added the Fascist manganello to the Mafia equipment, and Bolitho, after an investigation two years later, found that "Carnazza took into his service the celebrated Mafia and the hardly less redoubtable 'squadra del baltico' for whom he found much employment in the elections."

The addition of this criminal element to the armed forces of the new state made itself felt. According to Gilbert Murray, "many parts of Italy have long been accustomed to the rule of private extra-legal societies like the Camora, the Mafia, and the Black Hand. The Fascist Society is only a Camorra on a grand scale."

Today there is no longer a vegetable-racket Sicily. The peasants come in peace, the merchants haggle in peace, and quiet reigns. Because the Mafiosi, the Black-handers, have been transferred throughout the kingdom, doing their work on a national scale, levying taxation upon men and industries, administering castor oil to small offenders, shooting workingmen who attempt to flee into Switzerland or France, clubbing critics of the government and generally engaging in the old racket.

Their work is to get the money from the little men and to keep the little men in the Fascist line. For big-time work there are more important persons, the podestas, the minor dictators of cities and provinces. Thus the street-repaving job in Rome in Holy Year 1925 was found recently to have entailed a graft of $350,000 for the Black Camorra, while other municipal improvements so highly praised by Holy Year pilgrims netted another big sum. In Milan racketeering reached unprecedented heights. In many cities and rural districts Fascist Party racketeers levy tribute on their original backers, the big banks and industries. Following is a sample instance, a communique sent by the ras of the province of Pesaro Urbino to the wealthy:

"I have audited recently the amount of subventions given the Fascio by the proprietors in this province.

"It is useless for me to declare that I do not know how to employ so much money flowing into our treasury.

"Certain gentlemen, proprietors of many millions, have offered us sums which, in proportion to the capital which Fascism has saved them, amounts to almost nothing. On this account, considering that by the system we have employed up to now we have taken in practically nothing, I warn the proprietors of the province of Pesaro Urbino that I will impose upon them taxes in proportion to their capital and in such a fashion that I soon will be able to systematize definitely the financial situation of our province."

So it is that today when a black shirt is buttoned over a leading Fascist bosom, the fingers frequently are those of an old Black Hand. When an automobile sideswiped another, somewhere in New York or Chicago in the old bad days, when a stream of sub-machine gun bullets "rubbed out" a gangster, the finger on the trigger very likely was that of an old Mafiosi of Sicily who had been able to get away in time. And when a man is put on the spot, whether in Italy or America, it is frequently by the same common methods because the same type of men from the same native towns are employed. Fascism instead of deracinating the Black Hand, Camorra, and Mafia system, found a new use for its clever members.

Instead of terrorizing, extorting money, [1] or killing for the purpose of private gain, the "totalitarian" Mafiosi are trained to employ their talents "for national and patriotic purposes." They are dispersed throughout the country and some have important positions in the new secret-service organization which the new regime found necessary for its existence.

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Notes:

1. During the general strike in August, 1922, the following note was employed in several provinces:

National Fascist Party

Fascist Secret Provincial Committee of Action

We Fascisti are sacrificing our lives to smash this strike by every means. It is your duty to aid our movement financially in order to save the nation.

We therefore ask you to turn over to the bearer of this message — lire,

(signed) Secret Committee of Action.