In 1853, Abraham Lincoln supposedly wrote to Italian physicist Macedonio Melloni supporting what would later become Benito Mussolini's imperial agenda for the Mediterranean and Balkans. The uncharacteristically florid and even prophetic letter from the Springfield attorney next fell into the hands of Italian Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Mazzini, who was so “moved to tears” upon reading it that he decided to translate the text into Italian (Il Popolo d'Italia1920). For unknown reasons, the letter then became a hidden treasure of Melloni's extended family until Mussolini reprinted the full translation in his newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, on April 2, 1920 (Il Popolo d'Italia 1920; Tamblé 2016, 436).The letter was, of course, a forgery, but despite early accusations of inauthenticity, it succeeded in raising Il Popolo's profile and stature throughout Italy. Historian Gaetano Salvemini explained the letter's most obvious mistake to Italy's Chamber of Deputies months after its publication: The letter-writer mentions a “Tridentine Venetia and a Julian Venetia”—two geographic neologisms coined six years after the letter was drafted (Rocca 1943, 372). Mussolini was not deterred. Fascists republished the letter in 1931, this time gaining the attention of US historians, who responded with strong condemnation. Anxious to disprove the allegations, they scoured the Lincoln archives for any evidence of the president's correspondence with Melloni or signs that he was so precociously aware of Italian geography while working as a lawyer in Illinois.Lincoln scholars had long been accustomed to seeing the Great Emancipator used for political purposes. After his assassination, Democrats, Republicans, and Radical Republicans fought over the president's legacy and his “true” plans for Reconstruction. In the early twentieth century, William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt wrestled with the question of whether Lincoln would have approved of Progressivism, and in 1932 Herbert Hoover likened the Great Depression to the nadir of the Civil War, spurring Democrats to claim Lincoln as a father of the New Deal (Donald 2001, 3–14). Mythologies and fabrications about Lincoln were also prevalent, even while he lived. His cousin John Hanks, who helped coin the nickname “the Rail Splitter” for Lincoln, gave vivid testimony about his strong reaction to seeing a slave auction in New Orleans. Though Hanks did not actually accompany Lincoln to New Orleans, that myth remains popular today (Foner 2010, 10; Campanella 2010, 207–220).1Eventually, in October of 1936, experts from the United States and Italy met in Rome to definitively prove the letter's inauthenticity, though not everyone got the message. In a response to a query about the letter a year later, Dr. Louis A. Warren, director of the Lincoln National Life Foundation, referred to the Rome meeting when he wrote, “There is no doubt whatever but what the letter said to have been written to the scientist Melloni is a forgery” (Warren 1937). By that point, Mussolini was no longer a Milanese newspaper editor hoping to make national news with an easy gimmick but the prime minister of Italy overseeing an expansive international propaganda machine run through the Ministry of Popular Culture. While the Americans tried to debunk a sixteen-year-old attempt by Mussolini to turn American history into Fascist propaganda, they remained unaware of the more nuanced and effective methodology Italians had developed in the intervening years to make American history Fascist. By the 1930s, Italian Fascists had moved past blatantly fabricating US history into reinterpreting it in a more pro-Fascist light. Through radio, print, and public celebrations, they did this in two noticeable ways.First, Fascists turned US historical figures into proto-Fascists, citing shared attributes, experiences, and ideologies between Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Benito Mussolini. The biographies they produced contributed to the cult of Mussolini by comparing him favorably to past leaders and encouraging Italian Americans to believe that Italy and America were more united than opposed. Second, they “discovered” several Italian Americans who had been forgotten and rewrote the histories of others to shape them into paragons of Fascist transnationalism. The Italian American fur trader Francesco Vigo became a hero both of the Revolutionary War and the Italo-Ethiopian War via Fascist propaganda. Reimagined tales of heroes like Vigo served as allegories for Fascism and provided a blueprint for how Italian Americans should act in support of their homeland. Together, these revisions to American history gave Italian Americans and American politicians a foundation from which to promote Mussolini's political agenda in the United States.Fascists’ entry into US historical revisionism coincided with an era of fiery debates over “new history” in the United States. Throughout the 1920s, school boards clashed over the question of whether textbooks should embrace cultural pluralism and its inclusion of ethnic Americans in the mythologies of the Revolutionary War. Critics of new history labeled pluralists anti-American socialists who pandered to ethnic voters by approving “treasonous” textbooks encouraging hyphenated identities, race conflict, and Bolshevism. Even many ethnic groups faulted new history for diminishing the greatness of the Revolutionary generation, which included such immigrants as the French Marquis de Lafayette, German Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, and Polish Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Notwithstanding great zealotry on both sides of the textbook debate, the Fascist intervention in American public history went unacknowledged (Zimmerman 2002). Since that time, scholars have noted American intellectuals’ interest in Italian Fascism and the opinions they formed of Mussolini, ranging from great admiration to tepid toleration at least until 1935, yet none have examined his highly effective strategy of utilizing American history as pro-Fascist propaganda (see, for instance Diggins 1966, 1972; Alpers 2003; Fallace 2018).Fascists entered the American history wars with their own background in politicizing history, and Mussolini's skill in manipulating the Italian past is well documented (Stone 1999; Visser 1992; Fogu 2003; Nelis 2007; Pretelli 2012). Fascists and their intellectual supporters used the pre-existing cult of romanità, or classical Roman history, to establish historic authority for Fascism's imperial agenda. Fascists successfully turned themes of that history into a shorthand for contemporary Italian nationalism and an ideological basis for fulfilling Rome's imperial promise. As Italian historian Emilio Gentile writes, for Mussolini, “history was an arsenal from which to draw myths of mobilization and legitimation of political action” (Gentile 2002, 298).Except for the Lincoln forgery's short-lived infamy, however, almost nothing is known about how practitioners in the United States employed the same tactics in turning American history Fascist. Even Gaetano Salvemini did not write about the Fascist turn in Italian American history, though he did write extensively about the reach of Fascism in the US while in exile teaching history at Harvard (Salvemini 1977).2 Just as romanità lent legitimacy to Fascist imperialism and facilitated widespread distribution of Fascist propaganda, so too did US history's role in Fascist propaganda provide ideological backing for a Fascist agenda in the United States. And as with romanità, the propagandizing of US history was not simply the result of one clear policy dictated from Rome. It was instead developed over time by journalists, performers, politicians, scholars, and businessmen—the so-called “pro-Fascists” who shared a communal aim of selling Fascism (Salvemini 1977).Following the Lincoln forgery, Mussolini made a second attempt at uniting Italian and American history in 1928 by penning an article on George Washington for the New York Herald Tribune. Printed three days before Washington's 196th birthday, it was billed as Mussolini's first article written in English, though his mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, acted as his ghost writer for the piece (Nasaw 2000, 471; Luconi and Tintori 2004, 132). Mussolini opened the article by listing the qualities that he admired most in Washington, including “his integrity, his generosity, his endurance under adverse circumstances” as well as his “mental gifts” of memory, attention to detail, industriousness, patience, and “realistic lucidity in the penetration of difficult problems” (Mussolini 1928). While Italy consolidated its own national unity, Mussolini wrote that it could take lessons from the first US president. As Italy's leader, he felt particularly “moved by the breath [sic] of fellow feeling” upon reading Washington's written words, and he quoted from four of the president's letters, offering commentary on the lessons he took from each.Mussolini began with excerpts from two letters Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton (Washington 1787; Washington 1795a). In the first, written during the Constitutional Convention in July of 1787, Washington stated his dislike for men “who oppose a strong, energetic government.” In the second, written in 1795 and regarding popular opinion on the Jay Treaty, he warned that the foes of good government were “always working and distilling their poison.” Mussolini interpreted Washington's meaning in both letters as support of swift, decisive action for the sake of reform in the face of political deadlock. Next, Mussolini quoted from a letter to Edmund Randolph in 1792 in which Washington complained that his government was “a constant theme for newspaper abuse” (Washington 1792). The prime minister was impressed that Washington “realized the danger to constructive government from attacks by the press.” While Washington did nothing to curtail the freedom of the press, by 1928 Mussolini had taken complete control of the Italian domestic press and regularly used both legal maneuvers and state violence to suspend, sequester, and shut down the opposition press in Italy (Talbot 2007, 21–38). On February 20, the day following the article's publication in the United States, Mussolini created a “Professional Roll of Journalists,” which provided numerous financial benefits for foreign journalists stationed in Italy as long as they remained in good standing with the government (Diggins 1972, 43).Finally, Mussolini selected a line from a letter to ad interim secretary of state Timothy Pickering (Washington 1795b) in which Washington declared he would not place a man in his cabinet “whose political tenets are adverse to the measures which the general government is pursuing.” Mussolini saw this as a precedent for ridding one's government of political adversaries, explaining, “This was afterward adopted as the principle of the government of the United States. And it has also been adopted by the national government of Fascist Italy” (Mussolini 1928). While Washington's words set a precedent for presidents to limit cabinet appointments to members of their own party, Mussolini banned all political parties except for his and orchestrated the murders of his political rivals (Canali 2009). The article concluded with Mussolini mocking the American newspaper Aurora for writing during Washington's second term that his “debauched” behavior would be a “warning to the future ages” (Mussolini 1928). Honoring those who had the “common sense and intelligence” to appreciate Washington's vision in his time, Mussolini implicitly invited Americans to understand the vision of Italy's first dictator in light of the history of America's first president (Mussolini 1928).Mussolini's timing was propitious, for historians were then undertaking a reexamination of Washington's life and character that allowed space for new interpretations of the president's legacy. In the six decades immediately following Washington's death, American biographers had mostly emphasized his gentility and virtue. His image changed in the aftermath of the Civil War when the same nobility of character made him seem cold, rigid, and distant to popular audiences. As the deification of Revolutionary heroes subsided, historians sought to discover a more realistic, complicated person, who was more accessible to average Americans. Growing divisions in American society during the Industrial Revolution precipitated divisions over Washington's legacy. Whether the first president was a champion of the aristocracy, of democracy, or even capitalism became a question of perspective. By the early 1920s, progressives found him useful as a paragon of a benevolent businessman rather than a triumphant general, and he became a heroic standard against which greedy capitalists of the day fell short (Schwartz 1991).Just as Washington was becoming a more complicated and contested figure, he was also seeing a resurgence in popularity. The year prior to Mussolini's article, President Calvin Coolidge had made history via a radio address to a joint session of Congress on the topic of George Washington; a record number of radio hookups connecting forty-two stations broadcast the speech across the United States while countless foreigners listened in London, Paris, and Berlin, or on shortwave in Central America (Christian Science Monitor1927b). In the speech, Coolidge applauded the recent changes historians had made to Washington's spotless image and touted the newer, more realistic Washington as a better model for average Americans. He highlighted Washington's devotion to education, interest in banking and American expansion, and his great business acumen, as had become the vogue (Christian Science Monitor1927a).Coolidge's address inaugurated official preparations for Washington's two hundredth birthday, but his speech also served to increase interest in the country's first president even among an immigrant population that had been stubbornly resistant to Americanization. Prior to the 1920s, Italians had one of the highest rates of repatriation, at 54 percent, and more often than not, Italian immigrants considered their time in America to be temporary (Klein 1983). Italian ethnic newspapers in America reflected their readers’ international interests, with the vast majority of column inches going toward foreign news or advertisements (Pozzetta 1973, 38; Vecoli 1998, 21). The largest of the Italian-language papers, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, was a strictly commercial operation that saved money in its early years by reprinting foreign news from Italian papers or translating articles from the American press (Pozzetta 1973, 32). The paper began recognizing the holiday of Washington's Birthday in the early twentieth century, though its coverage was sporadic. Some years it mentioned nothing about it or merely explained why banks were closed, while in others it devoted multiple columns to extolling Washington's virtues. Throughout this period, Il Progresso tended to treat the holiday and the president as a foreign curiosity, as it wrote in the opening lines of an article it printed on multiple years: “Only when the history of other peoples is known, even briefly, will it be possible to understand the esteem that one hears and reads every day about the facts of our nation” (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1911; Il Progresso Italo-Americano1923a).Major changes to immigrant culture followed intense Americanization campaigns in the early twentieth century, as well as a slowdown of European migration that was exacerbated by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. By 1923, more Italian immigrants were planning on making America their home and demonstrated a greater interest in learning American history. That year, Il Progresso Italo-Americano registered those changes in its readers by including lengthy biographies of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on several pages, including full-page images of both presidents in its Sunday supplements. In a front-page editorial on Washington's birthday, the paper suggested its readers pick up a biography of the president, indicating that better knowledge of this American hero would shed “light for understanding the significance of that oft-discussed ‘Americanism.’” While the paper claimed Washington was the archetypal American “in the intellectual, sentimental, and even physical sense,” he was also “the American figure who can serve as an example to recognize how apocryphal is the Americanism of the many so-called ‘hundred percent Americans’” (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1923b). Just as the community was coming to terms with its transnationalism and facing ambivalence about naturalization, Il Progresso was unsure whether to use Washington as a model for Americanization or as a rebuke against the forces of assimilation.The same feelings of ambivalence over immigrants’ transnationalism, their resentment for the unyielding pressure to Americanize, and frustration with their low position in the United States contributed to Italian Americans’ interest in Fascism in the following years (Salvemini 1977; Diggins 1972; Cannistraro 1999). By 1930, Mussolini learned to capitalize on those feelings by deploying the Ministry of Press and Propaganda (later renamed the Ministry of Popular Culture) to covertly assist the Italian American media in spreading the Fascist message.3 The pages of Il Progresso Italo-Americano show the effectiveness of Mussolini's new strategy after 1930. The paper had changed ownership in 1928 when the self-made millionaire Generoso Pope acquired it to promote his own business and political interests. While other newspaper editors needed financial threats or incentives to toe the Fascist line, Pope was motivated to spread propaganda by the recognition and prestige he could get, and he earned several medals of honor and private meetings with Il Duce for his efforts. Under his leadership, Il Progresso spread Fascist propaganda daily to ninety thousand readers with the help of at least two staff journalists who simultaneously reported to the Ministry of Popular Culture (“Generoso Pope” 1944; Luconi 2000).With a new mission of indirect propaganda, Il Progresso employed Washington as a surrogate for Mussolini and a champion of Fascist politics. In 1931, the paper devoted a full page to Washington in its Sunday supplement under the headline “Why is George Washington greater than S. Adams and Franklin?” The text of the article, which the paper copied from the book Six Thousand Years of History: American Statesmen (Sanderson, Lamberton, and Morris 1910), provided this answer to its question: “Because men recognize but one law—force. . . . He, therefore, who uses the ultima ratio—he who relies wholly on force—will ever be first.” Following the translation of the book's thesis, Il Progresso added its own commentary under a subtitle “Washington, Supreme Dictator”: “In an uncertain hour in which many around him were hesitating, he was solemnly invested with supreme dictatorship. From a dictatorship, then, sprang this so-called democracy, this government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ as they call it. Dictatorships then can reserve great surprises, when the man is invested in it is truly great and sincere, like for example, it is these days in Italy with Benito Mussolini” (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1931). The paper further developed the claim that Washington was a dictator during his bicentennial the following year.4 In a full-page article written by staff journalist Angelo Flavio Guidi, who also worked for the Italian government, Guidi characterized Washington as a gentleman, soldier, man of politics, and national leader. He further described Washington as a Federalist, who—like Mussolini—believed in a strong central government, a belief that brought him political enemies who fought him openly and in secret. Making even more explicit his tacit comparison between Washington and Mussolini, Guidi asked: “Was Washington a dictator? No. But indeed he was. Because he understood that the State must be strong and that the executive head must have all the responsibility, but also all the power. No one had more respect than he did for Parliament and the popular will, but he conceived such respect in the Roman manner, and it shaped his intentions: ‘Country First and Country above all’” (Guidi 1932a).Washington was not the only American hero to become a benevolent dictator in the hands of Fascists. In a speech commemorating Lincoln's birthday in Springfield, as a special guest of Illinois governor Henry Horner, Italy's ambassador to the United States, Augusto Rosso, devoted much of his speech to comparing Lincoln and Mussolini. Rosso described Lincoln as a “builder in a time of destruction” who believed in the absolute right of a nation to stop its own demolition, adding that “these are the same fundamental principles that Mussolini followed when he took power.” He noted Lincoln's unprecedented expansion of executive authority, explaining that it was the same “policy of sane realism” that inspired the work of Mussolini in Italy. The two men shared more, according to Rosso: their deep patriotism, high sense of duty toward their country, moral and physical courage, force of will, and a balance of imagination and realism that allowed great statesmen to accomplish their goals (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1935a). In the telling of Fascists, Washington and Lincoln acted almost as dictators when they unified their young and fractured nation. Though they had been criticized in their day, the propagandists explained, Washington and Lincoln had birthed a nation that would become a global superpower, just as Mussolini would.While Fascists targeted both American and Italian emigrant audiences in early messages, they gave more attention to material published in English, which matched their general propaganda strategy. In the late 1920s, at the height of Fascism's popularity in the US, Fascists spread propaganda directly through William Randolph Hearst's syndicate and used the Italy-America Society and Casa Italiana at Columbia University to promote the Fascist agenda within elite American circles (Abbate 2002, 24; Santoro 2003; Diggins 1972). By the middle of the following decade, however, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia caused American approval of Mussolini to swiftly decline, just as Italian Americans were becoming an increasingly important political bloc (Luconi 2000). To reach audiences of Italian American voters and galvanize them in support of Italy's foreign policy, propagandists repositioned old heroes as allegories for Italy's imperial campaign and rediscovered new ones as paragons for Italian American political action.Italy's invasion of Ethiopia began in October of 1935 and reached its climax in May of 1936 with the occupation of Addis Ababa through an air assault of asphyxiating gas (Campbell 2017, 21–27). On the eve of his invasion, on October 2, 1935, Mussolini spoke to his nation via shortwave radio explaining his intention to send troops into Ethiopia despite the threat of sanctions from the League of Nations. In that speech he justified the invasion in terms of empire, honor, and destiny. Italy had paid its debt to the Allied cause with 670,000 war dead and 400,000 mutilated, “but when the victors sat around the peace table,” he lamented, “we were left with only the crumbs of the lavish colonial booty of the others.” Italy was told to be patient, and she had been, he explained, but “with Ethiopia we were patient for forty years. That is enough” (Susmel and Susmel 1959, 160).While empire and honor were first among Mussolini's reasons for invading Ethiopia when speaking to his citizens, those were not the justifications he gave to a foreign audience. As the voice of Italy in America, Ambassador Rosso employed different language to describe Italy's invasion on the American stage. At a dinner hosted by the Order Sons of Italy in America, Rosso justified the invasion as “a problem of life and security.” On the topic of life, Rosso explained Italy's desperate need for new land and new markets in which to sell its products. Rejecting the negative connotation of imperialism, the ambassador explained that without Ethiopia, Italy's forty-four million inhabitants faced a dismal future in which the growing unemployed population would resort to disorder, anarchy, or worse, bolshevism. On the matter of security, Rosso accused Ethiopia of keeping two million people in slavery and continuing to trade heavily in slaves despite promises to the League of Nations, and he asserted the Ethiopian government could not control most of its territory, leading to hostile and aggressive actions by Ethiopian armed forces against Italians. According to Rosso, Italy's victory would emancipate the Ethiopians and guarantee security for the Italians. Lastly, he promised Italy would eradicate deadly diseases, cultivate idle land, and exploit the earth's riches for the benefit of all, just as the United States had done for the Philippines and Panama (“Address of Signor A. Rosso” 1935).The speeches of these two men exemplified drastically different strategies for propaganda. In Italy, where Mussolini described the invasion as a fulfillment of Italian imperial destiny, the Ethiopian War served to heighten the cult of romanità. In the years following the invasion, Fascists fervently drew comparisons between Mussolini's soldiers conquering Ethiopia and the Roman victories against the Carthaginians. Importantly, it was the British—who led the League of Nations in imposing sanctions—and not the Ethiopians who represented the Carthaginians in this metaphor (Follo 2014). Romanità peaked in Italy in 1938 with the Mostra Augustea della Romanità, an exhibition of Roman history, organized by scholars from the National Institute of Fascist Culture, in which Mussolini's campaigns in Africa were justified as restoring ancient Roman lands (Stone 1999, 207).Justifications based on Roman imperialism worked on European soil, but as Ambassador Rosso noted in his first speech on the war, Americans considered imperialism a dirty word. In response, Fascist propagandists in the United States described the invasion as a humanitarian mission and looked for appropriate parallels within US history. In one popular approach, propagandists embraced a narrative in which Italians were emancipators of Ethiopian slaves, employing the history of Abraham Lincoln as justification. Weeks after Italy's invasion, Il Progresso Italo-Americano's Pope printed a front-page editorial in English, making the parallel clear, writing that “the same high spirit that brought Abraham Lincoln to action is the guiding star for Premier Mussolini as he sends his soldiers—ultimately envoys of peace—into the wastelands of Abyssinia.” Underscoring his point, he continued, “no sinister motive is behind their drive, even though blood, regrettably, is shed. But a program of liberty, enlightenment, and progress is back of the Italian army's advance against a people that has known naught but slavery, even though they exist in the deluded belief they are freemen” (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1935c). For Pope, though the war was regrettable, it was necessary for the liberation of unenlightened and enslaved people. In this editorial and in countless others published by his paper, Mussolini's original rationale for invading Ethiopia disappeared, and in its place, Pope repeated Rosso's justifications of liberation, civilization, and emancipation.A second historical comparison came from the story of Christopher Columbus and the US's treatment of Indigenous peoples. In this context the propagandists claimed a Fascist aim of spreading Christianity and European culture for the benefit of the Ethiopian people and used Columbus simultaneously as a symbol of Christian civilization and the Italian race. For the latter, at least, this was not a new tactic within the immigrant community. Since the earliest days of Italian migration, leaders used Columbus to elevate their status among Americans who degraded and even lynched them. At a time when being a new immigrant meant being undesirable, Italian Americans would evoke Columbus to make claims of belonging and a shared history. In a characteristic example, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia proudly told a gathering of Italian American college graduates from the class of 1935, “In this country there is a great tradition from those descendants of the Mayflower. But you and I come from descendants of the Santa Maria” (Il Progresso Italo-Americano1935b). Even though LaGuardia was firmly anti-Fascist—to his political detriment as the first Italian American mayor of New York—comments like his served Fascist aims of making Italians proud of their heritage.Less-principled politicians were amenable to using Columbus even when it meant spreading Fascist propaganda. In 1930, when Mussolini enjoyed popular support among Americans, Boston's mayor Timothy Curley made use of Mussolini and Columbus in a speech honoring Italy's ambassador Giacomo de Martino after dedicating an athletic stadium at the city's Columbus Park. Mayor Curley opened his speech listing the great contributions Italians had made to the world, stating: “The contribution of Columbus to human progress and human happiness does not differ materially, except in volume, from the character of contribution the Italian race has made in every century to religion, art, literature, science and government.” Curley continued by listing famous Italian men including Dante, Michelangelo, Verdi, Cavour, and Mazzini, paying special attention to their faith in God. He continued: “This sublime faith . . . appear[s] to be a part of the very atmosphere itself of Italy, and when at the close of the recent World War the forces of destruction sought to substitute communism and anarchy for the established order . .