Unto the Sons (75 page)

In an effort to become less identifiably Italian, increasing numbers of Italians in the United States changed their names legally, or conducted their businesses under aliases. A blue-eyed Sicilian bantamweight prizefighter who settled in New Jersey and fought in the American ring under the name Marty O’Brien thought that having an Irish name would make him more employable with the many Irish-American promoters and more popular with the fans. But the only lasting popularity that came his
way was through his son, who in later years readily found employment
without
changing the family name. The name was Sinatra.

Although there were nearly one million Italians in New York City in 1922, they were not a significant voting bloc. Either they were not registered to vote, or as noncitizens they were unqualified to do so. There was not one New York district leader with an Italian name among local Democrats and Republicans. When Fiorello La Guardia, frustrated by the powerlessness he felt as a junior legislator in the House of Representatives, entered the Republican primary of the New York mayoral race of 1921, he failed to carry a single borough. (It would be 1933 before he was elected mayor.) Until 1922, the public high schools of New York banned the teaching of the Italian language. The school system offered no courses in Italian history or culture. An educator named Leonard Covello, who grew up in an Italian ghetto in East Harlem and attended Columbia University, lamented that the process toward Americanization for Italian youths began “by learning to be ashamed of our parents.”

The Italian government in Rome occasionally registered complaints against anti-Italianism in the United States, as well as the country’s continuing limitation on immigrants arriving from southern Europe; but the parliament in Rome had no influence in America. The parliament in Rome barely had influence in Italy. The only bold voice in the government belonged to the Milan newspaper publisher, Benito Mussolini, who in 1921 was elected—along with thirty-four other Fascist candidates—to parliament, where the largest number of deputy seats was held by 122 Socialists, followed by 107 members of the Catholic party.

Mussolini’s main strength, however, was not in the political arena in Rome, but in his connection to northern Italian industrialists and merchants who were weary of strikes and leftist solicitation and were willing to subsidize the gangs of strikebreakers and leg-breakers who had rallied to his call for a military-style response to civilian disorder and affronts to patriotism. Mussolini’s newspaper,
Il Popolo d’Italia
, had empathized with the veterans who had returned home from the trenches only to find hollow lives open to them. In Mussolini’s private meetings with many veterans, his stirring articulation of their grievances soon earned him their gratitude, and eventually their recognition of him as their spokesman and the mastermind they referred to as
“il Duce.”
They saluted him, as he preferred, with their right hands above their heads in the manner of the ancient Romans. His calling them “Fascists” was also of Roman origin:
fascio
came from the Latin word for “bundle”; and specific to Mussolini’s purpose,
it referred to the bundle of sticks tightly bound to an axe that had been the emblem of the Roman magistrates’ authority.

Mussolini’s battle-experienced henchmen and their companions, among them student dropouts and restless vagabonds who had been found unfit for military service, adopted the fashion of an Italian wartime unit that had worn black shirts, and they organized themselves into several brutish, mournful-looking brigades throughout the nation—an appropriately dark version of the red-shirted Garibaldini in this bleak period of Italian history. More than half a million Italians had died in World War I, and the government in Rome felt far from compensated; much of the foreign territory it had been promised by the Anglo-French alliance in 1915 as an inducement to enter the conflict as an ally had been disputed at the Paris peace table by President Wilson of the United States, the late entrant to the war. Wilson believed that natives of the contested territories had legitimate rights of their own in determining their national affiliation. Italy’s warrior poet Gabriele D’Annunzio became outraged, and in an article in Mussolini’s newspaper he fulminated against the “mutilated” settlement being offered to Italy for its part in winning the war. American bankers simultaneously issued economic threats against Italy because of the nation’s tardiness in repaying its war debts, while Italy often waited in vain with its European wartime allies for defeated Germany to abide by its schedule of reparations payments to
them
. But even if Italy had been a nation of less insolvency and more jobs, many of its returning veterans would have been unable to hold such jobs, being too maimed or mentally disturbed, like Sebastian Talese, or otherwise unqualified; a high percentage of them had been rushed to the front as teenagers with no occupational skills for civilian life.

Now, however, through Mussolini’s militia, some of these men of sound body, if not always sound mind, could find work where the prerequisite skill was the ability to intimidate. When a nationwide strike was proposed by Socialist organizers in the summer of 1922 to protest the government’s laxity in curtailing the callous tactics of “reactionary forces,” Mussolini’s underlings threatened reprisals; and before the strike could achieve its ends, members of the militia, together with many like-minded citizens and students, seized control of several utility centers and manned the operation of streetcars, trains, mail delivery, and other public services. Although they performed with limited efficiency, their gesture was appreciated by great numbers of average citizens, and it tended to convince many vacillating Italians that Fascism offered the best hope for restoring enterprise and order to Italy.

In late October 1922, Mussolini was the honored guest at a Fascist rally in Naples. There he spoke before a parade attended by thousands of his supporters, many wearing black shirts, others in business suits or plain workmen’s attire. He also addressed a smaller gathering within the Bourbon-built San Carlo opera house, before a set for
Madama Butterfly;
here he stood facing rows of glittering boxes occupied by dignitaries who the previous year had mourned the death of their hometown hero, Enrico Caruso. Mussolini received bravos and Roman salutes from the crowds wherever he spoke as he announced his plans for economic improvements and firm leadership. He envisioned a Fascist state that would continue to respect the existence of a royal dynasty but would expect little monarchic opposition. He was confident that this arrangement would be acceptable to the king in Rome. Victor Emmanuel III was a diffident sovereign, perhaps influenced by the fact that the life of his father, Umberto I, had been terminated in 1900 by the bullets of an anarchist.

But if the king or his supporters in parliament attempted to thwart the rise of Fascism, their opposition would be overpowered—this was made clear by Mussolini in his talks to the people in Naples. “I’ll tell you with the solemnity that the moment calls for: Either the government will be given to us, or we shall take it, descending upon Rome. It is now a question of days, perhaps of hours.…” To this the crowd chanted its approval: “To Rome! To Rome!”

Before leaving Naples on October 24, 1922, Mussolini composed a proclamation, which he dated October 27. It began:

Fascists! Italians!

The hour of the decisive battle has come. Four years ago at this time the national army unleashed the supreme offensive that led to victory; today, the army of Blackshirts seizes again the mutilated victory and, pointing desperately toward Rome, restores it to the glory of the Capital.…

The Army, supreme reserve and safeguard of the nation, must not participate in this struggle. Fascism states again its highest admiration for the Army.… Neither does Fascism march against the police, but against a political class of half-wits and idiots that in four long years has not been able to give a true government to our nation.

Among Mussolini’s principal advisers at this time were retired military men, patrician landholders, and fellow journalists. (A Fascist in 1919
had been the conductor Arturo Toscanini, who was a candidate for parliament that year—when all the Fascists, including Mussolini, had been defeated in a Socialist landslide. Soon, emerging political and personal differences between Toscanini and Mussolini prompted the former to leave the party and become in time an ardent anti-Fascist, and eventually an exile in the United States. Within Mussolini’s circle there was room for only one maestro.)

Despite Mussolini’s highly publicized life—a life much analyzed in print by his friends, his enemies, and even himself in personal essays and an autobiography—he remained a perplexing figure. Once a committed Socialist, now a committed Fascist, he was perhaps not so much a man of the left or the right as he was a man of accommodation and opportunism. In a sense it might be argued that he was typically Italian, the creation of a vulnerable peninsula that endured intrinsically, along with its changing tides, its visiting visionaries and invaders, its endless welcoming ceremonies and shifting loyalties. Garibaldi once expressed his wrath toward his Italian contemporaries by calling them a “generation of hermaphrodites”; and he also cited the “jealousy and the bickering which is unfortunately a quality” of the Italian temperament. “We Italians have suffered enough from being able to see too many sides at once,” complained a character in Peter Nichols’s historical novel on Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo; and if this was indeed an Italian dilemma, then Mussolini’s solution was in offering Italy a singular vision, his vision. In later years, however, after he had accomplished his coup and when he believed he had imposed his will upon the nation, he would say that governing the Italians “is not hard—it is merely useless.”

But in 1922, a week before his coup, he was eager for the opportunity to remedy the ills of the Italian nation. He had no intention of turning Italy into a republic; nor would the Blackshirts re-create in the piazzas of the Italian capital the bloody spectacle of the French Revolution or the punitive purges of the Bolsheviks in Russia. And yet how could the king’s loyalists trust Mussolini when, insofar as anyone could deduce from his chroniclers, his life had been marked by intrigues and duplicity? It had been suggested that he was a split personality, smitten by conflicts that were traceable to the divisiveness of his upbringing within his native village of Dovia, in the countryside of the town of Predappio, in the Romagna region far northeast of Rome. His mother, Rosa, had been a demanding schoolmistress and pious Catholic; his father, Alessandro, an atheist blacksmith who liked revolutionary politics and strong wine better than he liked working hard over his anvil to contribute to the financial
needs of his wife and three children. Alessandro’s political beliefs were an amalgam of anarchism, Marxism, and the anticlericalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi. When his first child was born, on July 29, 1883, he named him Benito, in honor of the revolutionary liberator of Mexico, Benito Juárez.

During his early adolescence, when forced to attend Mass, Benito at times seemed hypnotized by the burning candles and the glittering garments of the priest, but he invariably became restless in the pews, and often fainted after smelling the incense. Once when his mother ordered him to await her outside the church, he climbed to the top of the nearest tree and, as the parishioners filed out, pelted them with acorns and stones.

When Benito was nine, having completed with much disruption the only two grades taught in his mother’s elementary school, he would crawl back into her classroom and pinch the legs of the younger students. The Mussolinis’ living quarters were then located within the school building, next to the classroom, and Benito seemed to resent the attention his mother was giving the other children. She had wondered at times if he might be mentally unbalanced—as she had previously feared during the prolonged silences of his early childhood. When he began to express himself in words and sentences, however, they frequently came forth in torrents of anger and threats, which during his tenth year were accompanied by hostile acts: bloody fights with other young boys in the town; vandalism, or at least charges of it, levied against him by local merchants and street vendors that brought warnings from the police already familiar with his surname, since in the past they had often arrested his insurrectionist father. His mother wanted Benito out of town. When her husband was not in jail, the boy followed him around and assisted in subversive underground activities. Alessandro agreed with his wife that his left-wing radicalism would subject their son to excessive scrutiny from the law; and so he did not object when Rosa registered Benito in a boarding school twenty miles from home, a religious institution under the tutelage of Salesian friars. Troublesome as he was, young Benito was very bright. He was an omnivorous reader. His writing showed imagination and an impressive vocabulary. When not ill tempered, he spoke articulately and with a sense of reason that was convincing. His mother was sure he could become a teacher.

At the Salesian school the students were required to rise at dawn and to attend Mass; to supplement their hours of study with spiritual exercises and meditation; and to remain silent during meals. They dined at three tables, the composition of each determined by the amount of money the students’ parents or guardians had paid toward their enrollment. The
students whose tuition had been fully paid sat at the first table, where the food served was the finest and in the largest quantity. Those at the second table were fed by lower standards, while those seated at the third table were discriminated against even more noticeably. Benito Mussolini, at the third table, resented the more privileged pupils, and he shared as never before his father’s contempt for the Church.

During his second year, he led his tablemates in protests against the food, and he would not appear at daily Mass unless the monks dragged him there bodily, as they always did. After being hit during class by a teacher’s ruler, Benito retaliated by hurling an ink pot at his disciplinarian. Often he got into fights with his classmates; after he stabbed one with his penknife, he was expelled.