No abstract

This chapter addresses how American fascist sympathizers used Italo Balbo's 1933 North Atlantic flight to insist on the peaceful intentions of Benito Mussolini's regime. While it had been easy for most Americans to agree with fascist sympathizers' characterizations of Italo Balbo in July of 1933, the claims that Italy represented beauty, transcendence, and peace felt more farfetched as the decade progressed. Balbo alighted in Chicago only a few months after Adolf Hitler assumed dictatorial powers in Germany. The Italian airmen's flight helped to distance Italy under Mussolini — seemingly so beautiful and benign — from Germany under Hitler — blatantly brutal and threatening. These distinctions between Nazism and fascism became increasingly important for fascist sympathizers over the course of the mid-1930s, under mounting evidence that the two regimes were drawing closer together, both in style and in fact. Metaphors of the garden, which seemed so natural for many Americans on the occasion of Balbo's flight in 1933, felt increasingly false, forced, and strained by 1937, given the realities of life in Italy and the foreign policy of the fascist state.

A teaching note on Audre Lorde's Zami, pitched for undergraduates.

This chapter focuses on the fascist sympathizers' accounts of the destruction of democracy and the creation of the corporate state in Italy. In the late 1920s, Herbert Schneider, Richard Washburn Child, Anne O'Hare McCormick, and Generoso Pope presented a three-part argument about democracy and political reform in Italy and the United States. First, they harked back to the time of a multiparty system in Italy to imply a cautionary tale for the United States. Even if American democracy had not sunk to the same nadir as Italian democracy, a lack of congressional expertise, the rise of special interest groups, and popular disillusionment meant that it was experiencing similar symptoms of decay, they suggested. Second, they insisted that, through the corporate state, the fascist government had adapted political institutions to contemporary exigencies, enabling expert and efficient management of economic problems, and advancing policies in the direction of the general good. Last, these observers argued that the United States, too, needed to look beyond its preexisting institutions of government to create a state that was adept at dealing with the problems of modernity. They used fascist Italy to transport Americans to a different place, where policies were better managed, and the government was more popular, than in the United States.

This chapter examines how American sympathizers with fascism reacted against the prevailing culture of disillusionment in the wake of World War I. By 1922, they could tell Italy's story in a satisfying narrative arc, starting with despair and ending with redemption. According to their perceptions, Italians in 1920 were extreme embodiments of the modern mood. These observers argued that fascist squads excited senses numbed by the apathetic atmosphere left in the wake of the war. Richard Washburn Child and Herbert Schneider both suggested that fascist violence was not necessary for the suppression of communism. Anne O'Hare McCormick, by contrast, insisted that the fascists prevented a Bolshevik-style revolution in Italy. But whatever their position on the relationship between the biennio rosso and fascism, all three of these observers admired squadrist violence qua violence.