Mussolini y Argentina. La creación de la colonia Regina (1924) como primera experiencia de expansión fascista en el extranjero durante la presidencia de Marcelo T. de Alvear

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Book Reviews 129 Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada, 1920-1940, by Martin Robin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 372 pp. $60.00 (c); $16.95 (P). By excoriating nativist and "fascist" extremism during the interwar years, liberal scholars long delegitimized what they perceived as "unAmerican " bigotry. Liberal-pluralists like Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Talcott Parsons, among others, argued that such politics had more in common with the totalitarian regimes ofAdolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini than the Republican Party of the United States. In recent years, however, historians Leo P. Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, and Alan Dawley have challenged this view, exhibiting empathy with such mass leaders as Father Coughlin and Huey Long, and locating "extremist" politics as much within the marrow of American politics as on the fringes. Sadly, the history of the last fifty years teaches that a prime determinant within nativism and fascism-as well as within the everyday lives of most citizens-remains antisemitism. Hatred of, and discrimination against, Jews may have declined in intensity within the United States and Canada since the Second World War, but there can be no doubt that antisemitism lurks ever beneath that thin veneer we term civilization. In Canada, as in the United States, the Great Depression shattered the faith of many citizens in the ability of representative politics to cope with unprecedented economic and social dislocation. Professor Martin Robin, who teaches political science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, provides an interesting overview of the genesis and evolution of the right-wing in Canada during the 1920s and 1930s. Shades ofRight reflects solid grounding in Canadian secondary and primary sourcesalthough the use of German documents would have helped clarify the connections between Hitler's Reich and the Canadian fascists. Robin's work is primarily descriptive. Building on such studies as LitaRose Betcherman's The Swastika and the Maple Leaf(1975), David Rome's Clouds in the Thirties (1977), Howard Palmer's Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta (1982), and Julian Sher's White Hoods (1983), as well as a number of unpublished Ph.D. dissertations, Robin breaks new ground in seeing the continuum between the 1920s and the 1930s, and in seeking to provide an overview of extremist politics in a diverse, sprawling country. Among other topics, he explores the "toxic American transplant" of the Ku Klux Klan-which, his evidence suggests, overlapped significantly with Orange Lodges in Ontario, and similarly adapted itself to the historical culture of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Though Robin fails to make the connection (in fact, he seems 130 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 in his one mention of Henry Ford to make him a klansman [po 8]), antisemitic themes Ford popularized during the 1920s in his notorious Dearborn Independent enjoyed great prominence in Canadian venues, in both Klan and nativist/fascist propaganda, as they did in Nazi Germany itself. If the Klan provided the gaudiest show within Canadian nativism (suggesting that for some persons, especially in agrarian regions, the depression arrived well before 1930), other movements of more restricted geographical area emerged soon thereafter. Robin assess the Christian national socialists in Quebec who took the name of Goglus-or skunk blackbird (bobolink), unfair to that admittedly obnoxious bird, but productive of Canada's number-one fascist of the 1930s, Adrien Arcand. Where many pro-fascist leaders and groups enjoyed little success and less longevity, Arcand retained a constant presence until war came in 1939. Robin tells his story well. He assesses the impact various shirted groups exerted, especially upon Canadian urban enclaves of German and Italian immigrants. Assessments of developments in Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal are particularly strong. He also traces the impact of nativist extremists on the established political order on local and provincial levels, as well as their interaction with German consular offices across the country. One point that becomes clear during the book is that antisemitism was no monopoly of the political fringe-that prejudice and concomitant discrimination permeated Canadian society. Yet despite strengths, the book is ultimately disappointing. The index is bare bones, a mere afterthought lacking in imagination and key entries. The author lowers his (and his...

In the build-up to the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, Fascism’s ideological profile was taking shape. In 1932, Mussolini allegedly co-authored the official entry for ‘Fascism’ in the Enciclopedia Italiana — a text that constituted the first systematic attempt to describe the ideological foundations of the movement and regime that had come to power in Italy a decade earlier. Among its many stipulations, the text noted that Fascism ‘is a new style of Italian life’. However, in the document’s appendix, there was a reference to an earlier speech (Milan, October 1930) by Mussolini, with a rather different message: Today I hold that Fascism as an idea, a doctrine, a realization, is universal; it is Italian in its particular institutions, but it is universal in the spirit … Therefore anyone may foresee a Fascist Europe — a Europe inspired for its institutions from the doctrine and practice of Fascism; a Europe that solves, in a Fascist way, the problems that beset the modern [twentieth-century] State. Today Fascism responds to universal requirements; Fascism solves the threefold problem of relations between State and individual, between State and associations, between associations and organized associations. (Opera XXIV: 283) National or international? Italian or universal? Until 1932 Mussolini had sent out contradictory signals about the relevance of Fascism — as ideology and political system — beyond the borders of Italy.

This book represents a welcome addition to studies of fascism and migration. The history of both southern Italian immigration to Argentina and the Italian fascists’ attempts to dominate this immigrant community have been approached by Italian historians such as Emilio Gentile, Loris Zanatta, and Eugenia Scarzanella, among many others, as well as by Argentine historians such as Fernando Devoto and María Victoria Grillo. In this context, David Aliano’s book provides a refreshing look at old sources while also bringing new primary sources to the equation, from propaganda materials to school textbooks. His questions are also different from those of his Italian predecessors. Aliano is not so much interested in the history of fascism but rather in how studying its impact on Argentina’s Italian community helps us understand the complex history of Italian ideas and projects for the nation both inside and outside Italy.Aliano is well versed in migration studies and Italian history, and he aptly combines both in examining the Argentine context, where most Italian immigrants eventually became and thought of themselves as Argentines. This was, to be sure, the most frustrating dimension of the problem for Benito Mussolini and his propaganda team. But Aliano is not that concerned with the history of this transnational failure of fascism and what it says about that political movement’s geopolitical conceptions and practices. Rather, the book’s emphasis on national conceptions among the different actors in Italy and abroad allows the author to cogently highlight limits and continuities in the broader history of Italy’s state policies of emigration. For Aliano, important traditions of national identity were continued by the fascists, who added to these their specific political identity. He argues that national projects such as Mussolini’s attempts to convert Argentina’s Italian community to fascism were substantially transformed by their contexts of reception, which posed important limitations on a “national project outside of the nation-state” (p. 2). The book presents a fine history of the Italian community in Argentina and the failed attempts by fascists to proselytize it from the 1920s to the 1940s. It explores a diversity of topics, from propaganda aimed at the immigrants and the schooling of Italian children in Argentina to fascist-antifascist debates within the Italian immigrant community. The author stresses how the Italians of Argentina formed an Italian identity different from the more authoritarian one in vogue on the peninsula. Another element in the development of this more liberal national conception that Aliano cogently highlights is the significant role of Italian antifascism in Argentina. He explains how this identitarian diversity limited the expansion of fascism within the community. Without much elaboration, he also emphasizes how Argentine democratic traditions had an impact in this regard.But how can one explain this persistent liberalism in the context of an ever-increasing consolidation of militarism, authoritarianism, and even clerico-fascism in Argentina during the 1930s and 1940s, from José Félix Uriburu’s dictatorship in 1930 to the so-called Década Infame and the military dictatorship of 1943? To be sure, Aliano criticizes an emphasis on Argentine authoritarianism that downplays the centrality of Argentina’s liberal traditions. But he does not engage as much with the intricacies of the ways in which Argentina’s liberal civil society turned its back on an increasingly authoritarian state hegemonized by the church and the military. While Aliano is very engaged with migration studies on both sides of the Atlantic, his book could have benefited from a similar engagement with Argentine historiographical discussions of nation building and the politics of immigration, from the earlier ideas of an “alluvial” society to the debates in the 1980s and 1990s over the idea of the melting pot as well as the more recent pathbreaking works by Hilda Sabato on political participation. The important scholarship of Lilia Ana Bertoni is also absent from Aliano’s discussion. The book is at its best when analyzing the Italian community in Argentina. If Argentine historians will note these absences and, more generally, the book’s schematic view of their country’s history, they will also benefit from learning about the European, American, and more specifically Italian discussions of emigration that drive the questions and answers of this subtle, challenging book.This book raises important questions for the field of migration studies in Latin America and Europe. It is highly recommended for specialists in Latin American and European migration and ethnic studies as well as historians of Italian fascism. By focusing on what Mussolini’s national project for the Italian community of Argentina reveals about the changing nature of the idea of the Italian nation, the book critically complements current historiography. Aliano provides a new conceptual look at the history of European migration in Argentina.

This is a thoughtful analysis of fascist Italy's project to promote the political and ideological construction of transnational Italian nationhood among Italian immigrants in Argentina. The author draws effectively on government archival material in Italy and Argentina, as well as on newspaper and other sources, in exploring “the role played by Argentine national discourses in shaping the debate over Italian national identity that took place on Argentine soil” (p. 18). Benito Mussolini reversed 1920s nationalist alarm in Italy over early twentieth-century emigration by shaping alternative, inspiring notions of a geographically ample Italian nation. Aliano documents the multifaceted fascist project to win political converts among Italian immigrants in Argentina, which included offers of service from the renowned playwright Luigi Pirandello during two Argentine tours (1927 and 1936). While initially focused on political support for fascism, the project evolved to more subtle activities that included the sponsorship of educational initiatives and children's summer camps as well as a propaganda campaign that featured newsreels and handbooks for training fascists in Argentina.

In a speech of studied gravity before the National Council of Corporations in Rome last Tuesday Signor Mussolini declared to his hearers that the economic crisis under which the whole of creation groans and travails today is not a crisis in the private capitalist system, but of it. The Duce went further: the capitalist system had had its day. Its dynamic phase endured from 1830 to 1870; the static lasted only a decade, from 1870 to 1880; then came the phase of ‘decadence’, inaugurated by a system of cartels and trusts, and developing into a state-regulated economy. In this process the private capitalist system had ceased to be merely economic; it had become a widespread social problem, under whose baleful influence we were now standardized from the cradle to the grave: ‘a diabolical thing!’. These seem strange words from the creator of Europe’s corporative state par excellence; but stranger still followed. Signor Mussolini thought that Italy was not a capitalist nation, and never would be one. The corporative principle will in future secure the people’s well-being; therefore the new Chamber of Deputies, that relic of capitalist politics, when elected, will vote its own euthanasia and straight away proceed to commit it. Thereafter the National Council of Corporations is to assume power. The old parliamentary system, born with dynamic capitalism and liberalism, was now, like them, ripe for death. The Italian corporative renascence today, in a world of general crisis, would then impose itself everywhere, in Signor Mussolini’s view.

The essay intends to reconstruct the facts concerning the assassination attempt conceived, but never put in action, by the anarchist Michele Schirru against Benito Mussolini. Schirru was arrested in Rome on 3 February 1931, confessed the will to hit Mussolini, was sentenced to death and shot in Forte Braschi, in Rome, on 29 May 1931. The Schirru’s Case is historically relevant also because it is tied with a basic change in the istitutional structure of the Fascist State. The new Italian Penal Code, also known as Codice Rocco, which included exceptional laws concerning the crimes against the Duce, came in force in June 1931, just few days after Schirru’s death. The anarchist’s trial served well to solve some juridical matters both from the doctrinal and jurisprudential: point of view, as the precise statement of the notions of attentato (failed outrage) and tentativo (attempt), going beyond the distiction between preliminary and executory acts, and the specification of the concepts of crime esecutivita (enforceability), idoneita (suitability) and univocita (univocity).

Fascism left a rich legacy on the cityscape of Rome. Mussolini’s unquenchable appetite for new plans, new interventions, and new landmark projects created a genuine Fascist ‘layer’ — a kind of ‘(Fascist) city within the city’ — whose imprint on contemporary Rome is as unmistakeable as it is ineluctable. What was added to Rome’s visible layer between the mid-1920s and the early 1940s is sufficiently revealing about Fascism’s intention to transform the capital into the paragon of a new Fascist eutopia (Ch. 2). Yet, at the same time, it is an essentially incomplete, partial, incongruous, and potentially misleading snapshot of this very vision — a veritable Fascist non-finito. This is because a large part of this ideal ‘third Rome’ remained on paper — whether because time or funds ran out, because it was defeated in competitions, sidelined by various more pragmatic considerations or thwarted by Mussolini’s volatile judgements. Some of the most fascinating insights into the very essence (and often conflicting or shifting interpretations) of this eutopian vision may be found not only in what was built but also among plans and models of transient ideas that may have been often strongly desired and considered but that never materialised. Had they too been realised, Fascism’s architectural and planning legacy in the centre of the city would have been profoundly different to what we recognise today (Kallis 2011a).

Mario Magri, an Italian anti-Fascist, spent most of the last 17 years of his life in Benito Mussolini’s ‘political confinement’ (confino politico) colonies, located on small islands in the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.2 During the few months of freedom Magri enjoyed between the fall of Fascism (1943) and his execution by the Nazis at the horrific Ardeatine Caves Massacre outside Rome, he wrote about his experiences in Fascist captivity. In his memoir, Magri noted the anomalous presence of a group of homosexual men who had appeared in the confino politico colony on the Tremiti Islands, in the Adriatic, around 1939: There were about 100 perverts, almost all originating from Catania and other cities in Sicily. These poor devils, among whom there were skilled artisans and even teachers, lived in horrible conditions. They received four lire per day and were crammed into two foetid wooden barracks, surrounded by a metal fence that only allowed a few square metres in which to move around.3 The presence of these men in a penal colony for ‘politically dangerous’ Italians raises several salient questions about the experience of homosexuals under Fascism and about the very nature of Mussolini’s regime.

Benito Mussolini entered Rome on the morning of 30 October 1922 — not ‘marching’ like his followers but arriving by train (Parkins 2002: 145). He presented himself to king Vittorio Emanuele III at the Quirinale Palace and was sworn in as prime minister — an office that he held until his dismissal on 25 July 1943. He was placed in charge of a broad coalition government consisting of Fascist, liberal, conservative, and Catholic members (Lyttelton 2004: 79–80) — a victory of sorts that was celebrated by his supporters but remained a far cry from the ‘revolutionary’ takeover that would ‘take by the throat’ the hated paese legale (Opera XVIII: 460). The facade of constitutional propriety and continuity survived until January 1925, when Mussolini finally proclaimed a single-party Fascist dictatorship and signalled the beginning of the ‘totalitarian’ transformation of state and society.

The relation between Italian Fascism and the myth of romanita appears at first sight deceptively uncomplicated. From its early days as a radical movement the Fascists deployed a language that borrowed heavily from, and hinted at, the Roman past. Although the relationship between the early Fascist movement and Rome was fraught with contradictions (on the one hand, admiration for the values of the ancient Roman Empire; on the other hand, profound disdain for the city’s recent state of perceived political and moral decadence — see Ch. 1), the movement that Mussolini officially founded in 1919 paid the most emphatic tribute to the Roman past in its title and official emblem. Its first name (Fasci di Combattimento) invoked the imagery of the Roman fasces — a symbol made up of a bundle of wooden rods with a protruding axe that was carried by a special group of official protectors of the magistrates in ancient Rome (lictores) as a sign of unity, sovereign authority, and military might (Consolato 2006: 189). In modern times, the symbol had been widely used by a number of radical organisations, ranging from French revolutionaries in the eighteenth century to peasant organisations in Sicily to labour groupings of the socialist left in the nineteenth century (Giardina and Vauchez 2000: 224–7). Thus, for Mussolini the use of the word and emblem of the fasces exemplified two fundamental ideological facets of the fledgling movement: on the one hand, its derivation from the political and military traditions of the Roman Empire that it subsequently claimed to incarnate; on the other hand, its physiognomy as a radical revolutionary movement charting a new political path that identified its roots in a dissident synthesis of left radicalism and hyper-nationalism (Sternhell 1994: 1–7).

The transformation of Rome into Mussolini’s Rome required countless contracts for projects large and small. The regime, through the Governatorato, supervised building patronage on a grand scale. Indeed, Mussolini’s government acted in the same way throughout Italy. Much was at stake, both in terms of money and architectural style. A central question was: What style would win official recognition as the true “fascist” style?

Mussolini’s fascist revolution promised the Italian people two major changes: First, Italians would achieve internal unity, experience a new identity as Italians, and fulfill the promise of the Risorgimento to overcome the traditional divisions in the name of the new national community; and second, Italy would become a powerful nation capable of gaining the respect of other great powers and creating a new sphere of interest—a place in the sun—worthy of the Roman imperial tradition. The themes and messages integral to Mussolini’s transformation of Rome spoke to both these goals. The regime brought Italians from every corner of the land to see the new city emerging and to experience for themselves the pride and strength of being Italian. Fascism produced results. Visitors could see it in the new streets and buildings, in the new vistas opened by wide streets and boulevards, and in the ancient monuments now liberated and integrated into the Roman landscape. In the constant parades, events, and ceremonies, the Duce beckoned Italians to play their part in the new Italy now poised to make its mark in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the world.

The year 1932 marked an important stage of development for fascist Rome. The tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, the Decennale, offered the regime the opportunity to celebrate its achievements and especially to introduce new spaces and events in Rome. An English-language pamphlet of the state-sponsored tourist agency boasted that the regime had “completely transformed Italy” in its first decade. “Anyone visiting Rome after an absence of ten years can hardly believe that so many and such important works could have been accomplished during this short period of time.” It pointed to the Via dell’Impero, the new towns in the reclaimed areas of the Pontine Marshes, and the opening up of the city’s ancient monuments.1 Mussolini’s imprint already gave the city a new look appropriate to the rhythm of modern life, with one construction project after another superimposing a new and beautiful city on imperial Rome.2 “It is not exaggerated to affirm that side by side with old Rome and even within its walls, another city has sprung up or rather has been revealed during the last ten years: a new Rome that deserves to be visited as much as the old one generally described in guide-books.”3

The fifth marble map that was placed along the Via dell’Impero in 1934, depicting the new Mussolinian impero in the Mediterranean and Africa (Fig. 38), barely survived the collapse of the Fascist regime. Just like the faraway lands that it depicted as prized possessions of the Fascist imperialist imaginary in luminous white, the map was undone (in fact, defaced, removed, and destroyed, only to resurface half a century later from the basement of the Theatre of Marcellus) and allowed to fade from memory. The other four marble maps depicting the foundation of Rome and the expansion of the Roman Empire (Fig. 10) did survive the watershed, as did the avenue that they decorated and framed symbolically (Hyde Minor 1999: 149, 153–8). Yet, the change of its name into the more utilitarian ‘Street of the Imperial Fori’ (Via dei Fori Imperiali) in the autumn of 1944 altered the legibility of Fascism’s most high-profile work inside Rome’s historic centre. Every year, the avenue hosts a ceremonial parade, but the date (2 June) marks a very different occasion — the constitutional referendum that put an end to the rule of the Savoy monarchy and marked the birth of the First Italian Republic. Meanwhile, the other major Fascist-era street project in Rome’s historic centre, the Via del Mare, was also renamed into Via del Teatro di Marcello — a more narrowly descriptive toponymy deliberately revising the avenue’s original association with empire and Mediterranean expansion.