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American Sympathizers with Italian Fascism A The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathizers with Italian Fascism A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Catherine Susan Mary Hull, M.A. Washington, DC December 12, 2017 Copyright 2018 by Catherine Susan Mary Hull All Rights Reserved ii THE MACHINE HAS A SOUL: AMERICAN SYMPATHIZERS WITH ITALIAN FASCISM Catherine Susan Mary Hull, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Michael Kazin, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Americans across the political and cultural spectrum sympathized with Italian fascism in the interwar years. This dissertation demonstrates that American fascist sympathizers believed that Italy was coping better with the challenges of modernity than the United States. Fascist sympathizers argued that fascist squads revived older values of service and honor, even as Mussolini kept pace with a fast-moving society. They claimed that the corporate state was an up-to-date form of government, which protected Italians from the worst effects of the global depression. And, as the fascist state became increasingly totalitarian, they represented Italy as a place where men and women could transcend the grit and grind of modern life to find inner peace. American fascist sympathizers had various goals when they invoked Italy’s apparent successes in managing the challenges of modernity. First, they aimed to expose faults in their own society: the numbing effects of standardization; the erosion of higher ideals; the failure of government to protect Americans from the ravages of industrialization. Second, they suggested solutions to the United States’ problems: the reform of government to promote expertise in policymaking; and measures to create jobs and support the return to a simpler life. Finally, they aimed to send the reassuring message that Americans, too, could combine the best of the traditional and the modern, and have a government that was both effective and inspiring—a machine with a soul. This dissertation accesses fascist sympathizers’ views through the intellectual biographies of four prominent Americans, analyzing their journalism, lectures, books, and unpublished letters, and records of their contacts with officials in both Italy and the US. In contrast to the preexisting scholarship, this study shows that anxieties about modernity united American fascist sympathizers of various political persuasions and cultural tendencies. It sheds light onto fascism’s own ambivalent relationship with modernity, while illuminating issues that animated American public opinion and policymaking in the iii interwar years, including the cultural and social consequences of mass production, consumption, and urbanization, and the need to forge institutions and policies to ensure that men and women made their way through modernity with their souls intact. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. The Machine with a Soul .........................................................................................................1 Two (Very Different) Forerunners to this Study .......................................................................................3 Methodology and Scope ............................................................................................................................5 Four Fascist Sympathizers .........................................................................................................................7 What Explains Fascist Sympathies? ........................................................................................................16 Why American Fascist Sympathizers Matter ..........................................................................................19 Chapter I. The Good Adventure: Fascist Squads in a War-Weary World ...................................................27 The Wrong Side of Paradise ....................................................................................................................29 Italia Disprezzata .....................................................................................................................................31 The Weary World ....................................................................................................................................35 Renewing War .........................................................................................................................................38 March on Rome ........................................................................................................................................46 The Leader of the Fascists .......................................................................................................................51 The Promise of a New World ..................................................................................................................54 Chapter II. Mystic in a Morning Coat: Americans’ Mussolini in the 1920s ...............................................56 The Right Kind of Businessman ..............................................................................................................58 More Modern, More Italian .....................................................................................................................63 Italy’s Answer to Horatio Alger ..............................................................................................................65 Manliness Lost in the United States .........................................................................................................72 The Promise of Manhood Regained ........................................................................................................77 Old-Fashioned and Eternal ......................................................................................................................81 Panacea, Foil, and Model .........................................................................................................................86 Chapter III. The Dream Machine: The Fascist State in an Era of Democratic Disillusionment .................92 The Broken-Down Machine ....................................................................................................................96 The Crumbling Citadel ............................................................................................................................97 The Cadaver Sings .................................................................................................................................104 The Daily Plebiscite ...............................................................................................................................109 Homegrown Solutions ...........................................................................................................................115 Realities and Dreams .............................................................................................................................119 Chapter IV. Man as the Measure of All Things: Sympathizing with Fascism in the Early Depression Years ..........................................................................................................................................................122 The Machine-Made Crisis ......................................................................................................................123 ii Like Old Times ......................................................................................................................................127 The Search for a Leader .........................................................................................................................130 His Master’s Voice ................................................................................................................................134 Full Stomachs and Simple Satisfactions ................................................................................................137 Back to American Soil ...........................................................................................................................141 Making Work .........................................................................................................................................146 Why Can’t We? ......................................................................................................................................150 “Let’s Try It!” ........................................................................................................................................153 Flawed Realities .....................................................................................................................................155 Solutions in Strange Places ....................................................................................................................162 Chapter V. The Garden of Fascism: Beauty, Transcendence, and Peace in an Era of Uncertainty ..........164 Wild Flowers and the Wilderness ..........................................................................................................171 Urbe as Orta—City Planning in Italy and the United States .................................................................176 The Valley of Youth ..............................................................................................................................187 Escape to Abyssinia ...............................................................................................................................198
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