Stefano Luconi (University of Padua)

The fascination of many Italian immigrants and their US-born progeny with fascism foreran Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. It drew on Italian Americans’ recently developed nationalistic feelings and gained further momentum out of their sense of ethnic pride and redress resulting from the Duce’s alleged achievements. After its consolidation in the mid-1930s, it underwent a decline as Italy joined Nazi Germany in World War II and ended when Mussolini declared war on the United States in 1941.

The first fascio (Fascist club) in the United States was established in New York City as early as May 1, 1921, about one and a half years before Mussolini became Italy’s premier in the wake of his henchmen’s March on Rome of October 28, 1922. The founders were former activists of the anarcho-syndicalist labor union Industrial Workers of the World. Disappointed by the marginalization and intolerance of their fellow ethnics within the US labor movement and galvanized by Italy’s victory in World War I, they concluded that Italian Americans had to close ranks to improve their standing in American society and thought of fascism as an effective connecting tissue and source of inspiration.

Ideology, however, played second fiddle to other factors in building consensus for Mussolini in the Little Italies across the United States. Most Italian Americans were semi-literate and, therefore, usually unable to engage theoretical issues, although pro-Fascist ethnic newspapers—such as New York City’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano on the East Coast and San Francisco’s L’Italia in the West—flooded their readers with bombastic rhetoric extolling, for instance, the regime’s corporatism. Conversely, Italian Americans easily realized the esteem and appreciation that Mussolini enjoyed within the US establishment as a champion of anti-communism who had curbed the spread of Bolshevism in Europe, a modernizer who had enabled Italy to overcome its traditional backwardness and provided investment opportunities for American businesspeople, and a presumed political tamer of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The 1933 transatlantic flight of a twenty-four-plane squadron led by Italian Minister of Aviation Italo Balbo to Chicago and New York City contributed to the perception of Fascist Italy as a country ahead of time. After the box-office success of Mussolini Speaks, a 1933 propaganda movie that depicted the Italian dictator as a superhero, following in on his Republican predecessors’ footsteps, even Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt was pleased to refer to Mussolini as an “admirable Italian gentleman.” Washington’s appeasement added to the supposed exploits of the regime in the world arena by an aggressive foreign policy that, from the 1924 annexation of the Croatian city of Fiume to the 1936 proclamation of a colonial empire, offset Italy’s humiliation at the Paris peace conference at the end of World War I, when Rome’s nationalistic claims fell on deaf ears although the country was one of the winners of the military conflict.

In 1934 Republican Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, the co-sponsor of the 1924 Quota Act that had restricted Italian immigration to limit the arrival of migrants considered to be uncivilized and pre-modern individuals, stated that the United States needed someone like Mussolini to cope with the economic depression. After suffering from ethnic bigotry and prejudice on the grounds that they belonged to a purportedly inferior people by the Anglo-Saxon standards of US society, many Italian Americans basked in the glory of the alleged accomplishments of the Fascist regime and benefited from the improvement of their status in the eyes of their adoptive country once the Duce apparently made their native nation into a global power. Such feelings overwhelmed the few dissenting but outspoken voices of anti-fascism in the Little Italies. To explain Mussolini’s attractiveness, Gaetano Salvemini, a prominent anti-Fascist exile, argued that the immigrants “arrived in America illiterate, barefoot and carrying a knapsack [...]. They were treated with contempt by everybody because they were Italians. And now even the Americans told them that Mussolini had turned Italy into a mighty country, that there was no unemployment, that there was a bathroom in every apartment, that trains arrived on time, and that Italy inspired awe worldwide.”

The 1929 self-disbandment of the Fascist League of North America—the umbrella organization that coordinated the fasci in the United States—was not a litmus test for Italian Americans’ rejection of fascism. Indeed, it was Mussolini himself who imposed its dissolution as a smokescreen to defuse charges that Italian Americans operated as Fascist agents at his beck and call. He aimed at transforming the Little Italies into an effective pressure group that could lobby Congress and the presidency, advancing the interests of his regime, which entailed that their members had to sever formal ties to Italy’s Fascist Party. Mussolini also exploited Italian-language courses for second-generation Italian Americans to celebrate their ancestral culture and encouraged the expatriates’ progeny to visit Italy to strengthen their allegiance to the country and the regime.

By the time of the Italo-Ethiopian War between 1935 and 1936, Mussolini’s goal of building a devoted base in the Little Italies across the United States had been achieved. To consolidate the global influence of their native land and their own reputation in the United States, many Americans of Italian extraction rushed to back Mussolini’s colonial venture in eastern Africa. They persuaded their Senators and Representatives to table prospective sanctions against the Fascist regime for its unprovoked attack against Ethiopia and massively donated their wedding rings and other gold objects to fund the Duce’s military machine. They also raised large amounts of money for the Italian Red Cross, under the pretext of humanitarian help for the victims of the military conflict, although anti-Fascists repeatedly warned that such donations would end up in Mussolini’s war chest.

Identification with fascism climaxed with Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 although it did not last long following its partially expediential motivations. Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Semitic legislation failed to impair his popularity in the Little Italies because those discriminatory measures fitted Italian Americans’ preexisting rivalries with Jews in the United States. Yet, after Mussolini’s entry into World War II on June 10, 1940, terminated the US appeasement toward his regime, Italian Americans began to distance themselves from the Duce since the support of fascism was no longer an asset but had become a liability instead. By the time Italy declared war on the United States, too, on 11 December 1941, their disavowal of Mussolini was complete. Many even fought against the Italian dictatorship in the US armed forces on the battlefield.

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