Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From …

* 1 *Mussolini:The Father of Fascism

Youre the top!Youre the Great Houdini!Youre the top!You are Mussolini!An early version of the Cole Porter song Youre the Top (1)

IF YOU WENT solely by what you read in the

All of this amounts to playing the movie backward. By the time Italy reluctantly passed its shameful race lawswhich it never enforced with even a fraction of the barbarity shown by the Nazisover 75 percent of Italian Fascisms reign had already transpired. A full sixteen years elapsed between the March on Rome and the passage of Italy's race laws. To start with the Jews when talking about Mussolini is like starting with FDRs internment of the Japanese: it leaves a lot of the story on the cutting room floor. Throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s, fascism meant something very different from Auschwitz and Nuremberg. Before Hitler, in fact, it never occurred to anyone that fascism had anything to do with antiSemitism. Indeed, Mussolini was supported not only by the chief rabbi of Rome but by a substantial portion of the Italian Jewish community (and the world Jewish community). Moreover, Jews were overrepresented in the Italian Fascist movement from its founding in 1919 until they were kicked out in 1938.

Race did help turn the tables of American public opinion on Fascism. But it had nothing to do with the Jews. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Americans finally started to turn on him. In 1934 the hit Cole Porter song Youre the Top engendered nary a word of controversy over the line You are Mussolini! When Mussolini invaded that poor but noble African kingdom the following year, it irrevocably marred his image, and Americans decided they had had enough of his act. It was the first war of conquest by a Western European nation in over a decade, and Americans were distinctly unamused, particularly liberals and blacks. Still, it was a slow process. The

That's not to say he didn't have a good ride.

In 1923 the journalist Isaac F. Marcosson wrote admiringly in the

In 1926 the American humorist Will Rogers visited Italy and interviewed Mussolini. He told the

And why shouldnt the average American think Mussolini was anything but a great man? Winston Churchill had dubbed him the worlds greatest living lawgiver. Sigmund Freud sent Mussolini a copy of a book he cowrote with Albert Einstein, inscribed, To Benito Mussolini, from an old man who greets in the Ruler, the Hero of Culture. The opera titans Giacomo Puccini and Arturo Toscanini were both pioneering Fascist acolytes of Mussolini. Toscanini was an early member of the Milan circle of Fascists, which conferred an aura of seniority not unlike being a member of the Nazi Party in the days of the Beer Hall Putsch. Toscanini ran for the Italian parliament on a Fascist ticket in 1919 and didnt repudiate Fascism until twelve years later. (7)

Mussolini was a particular hero to the muckrakersthose progressive liberal journalists who famously looked out for the little guy. When Ida Tarbell, the famed reporter whose work helped break up Standard Oil, was sent to Italy in 1926 by

Meanwhile, almost all of Italys most famous and admired young intellectuals and artists were Fascists or Fascist sympathizers (the most notable exception was the literary critic Benedetto Croce). Giovanni Papini, the magical pragmatist so admired by William James, was deeply involved in the various intellectual movements that created Fascism. Papinis

Perhaps no elite institution in America was more accommodating to Fascism than Columbia University. In 1926 it established Casa Italiana, a center for the study of Italian culture and a lecture venue for prominent Italian scholars. It was Fascisms veritable home in America and a schoolhouse for budding Fascist ideologues, according to John Patrick Diggins. Mussolini himself had contributed some ornate Baroque furniture to Casa Italiana and had sent Columbias president, Nicholas Murray Butler, a signed photo thanking him for his most valuable contribution to the promotion of understanding between Fascist Italy and the United States. (9) Butler himself was not an advocate of fascism for America, but he did believe it was in the best interests of the Italian people and that it had been a very real success, well worth studying. This subtle distinctionfascism is good for Italians, but maybe not for Americawas held by a vast array of prominent liberal intellectuals in much the same way some liberals defend Castros communist experiment.

While academics debated the finer points of Mussolinis corporatist state, mainstream Americas interest in Mussolini far outstripped that of any other international figure in the 1920s. From 1925 to 1928 there were more than a hundred articles written on Mussolini in American publications and only fifteen on Stalin. (10) For more than a decade the

Hollywood moguls, noting his obvious theatrical gifts, hoped to make Mussolini a star of the big screen, and he appeared in

Fascism certainly had its critics in the 1920s and 1930s. Ernest Hemingway was skeptical of Mussolini almost from the start. Henry Miller disliked Fascisms program but admired Mussolinis will and strength. Some on the socalled Old Right, like the libertarian Albert J. Nock, saw Fascism as just another kind of statism. The nativist Ku Klux Klanironically, often called American fascists by liberalstended to despise Mussolini and his American followers (mainly because they were immigrants). Interestingly, the hard left had almost nothing to say about Italian Fascism for most of its first decade. While liberals were split into various unstable factions, the American left remained largely oblivious to Fascism until the Great Depression. When the left did finally start attacking Mussolini in earnestlargely on orders from Moscowthey lumped him in essentially the same category as Franklin Roosevelt, the socialist Norman Thomas, and the progressive Robert La Follette. (12)

Well be revisiting how American liberals and leftists viewed Fascism in subsequent chapters. But first it seems worth asking, how was this possible? Given everything weve been taught about the evils of fascism, how is it that for more than a decade this country was in significant respects profascist? Even more vexing, how is itconsidering that most liberals and leftists believe they were put on this earth to oppose fascism with every breaththat many if not most American liberals either admired Mussolini and his project or simply didnt care much about it one way or the other?

The answer resides in the fact that Fascism was born of a fascist moment in Western civilization, when a coalition of intellectuals going by various labelsprogressive, communist, socialist, and so forthbelieved the era of liberal democracy was drawing to a close. It was time for man to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image. God was long dead, and it was long overdue for men to take His place. Mussolini, a lifelong socialist intellectual, was a warrior in this crusade, and his Fascisma doctrine he created from the same intellectual material Lenin and Trotsky had built their movements withwas a grand leap into the era of experimentation that would sweep aside old dogmas and usher in a new age. This was in every significant way a project of the left as we understand the term today, a fact understood by Mussolini, his admirers, and his detractors. Mussolini declared often that the nineteenth century was the century of liberalism and the twentieth century would be the century of Fascism. It is only by examining his life and legacy that we can see how rightand lefthe was.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named after three revolutionary heroes. The name Benitoa Spanish name, as opposed to the Italian equivalent, Benedettowas inspired by Benito Jurez, the Mexican revolutionary turned president who not only toppled the emperor Maximilian but had him executed. The other two names were inspired by now-forgotten heroes of anarchistsocialism, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.

Mussolinis father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and ardent socialist with an anarchist bent who was a member of the First International along with Marx and Engels and served on the local socialist council. Alessandros [h]eart and mind were always filled and pulsing with socialistic theories, Mussolini recalled. His intense sympathies mingled with [socialist] doctrines and causes. He discussed them in the evening with his friends and his eyes filled with light. (13) On other nights Mussolini's father read him passages from

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Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From ...