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TWO

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

THOMAS EDISON HAILED HIM AS THE “GENIUS OF THE MODERN age”; Gandhi, as a “superman.” Winston Churchill pledged to stand by him in his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.” Newspapers in Rome, host to the Vatican, referred to him as “the incarnation of God.” In the end, people who had worshipped his every move hung his corpse upside down next to his mistress’s near a gas station in Milan.

Benito Mussolini was ushered into the world in Predappio, a small farming town forty miles northeast of Florence, in 1883. His father was a blacksmith and a Socialist, his mother a teacher and devout. He grew up in a two-room cottage attached to the one-room school where his mother taught. His family was comfortable but unable to afford full tuition at the priest-run boarding academy that he began attending at age nine. There, during meals, the wealthier students were assigned to one table, Benito and his companions to another—an indignity that kindled in Mussolini a lifelong rage against injustice (to him). The boy was full of mischief, often pilfering fruit from farmers and getting into fights. At eleven he was expelled for stabbing a fellow pupil in the hand, and at fifteen he was suspended for knifing a second classmate in the buttocks.

But Benito was also a reader. He loved to sit alone with the daily newspapers and the thousand-plus pages of Les Misérables. From his father he inherited a liking for bold action; his mother taught him patience—the twig bent his father’s way. In college, when other students griped to each other about the staleness of the bread they were supposed to eat, Mussolini confronted the rector one on one, causing his classmates to cheer, the rector to back down, and the bread to come freshly baked.

School days behind him, Mussolini earned a teacher’s certificate but lacked discipline in the classroom and was quickly cut loose. At nineteen, he headed to Switzerland, where he worked as a laborer, slept on a packing crate, and was jailed—the first of many arrests—for vagrancy. Out of prison, he got a job as a bricklayer and soon became active in the local union. This was a period in Europe when labor politics tilted sharply to the left and Socialist firebrands preached anger toward the government, contempt for the Church, and militancy on behalf of workers’ rights. Mussolini was not an original thinker, but he was a gifted actor who could play a role. Though neatly dressed in private, he often refrained from shaving or combing his hair before appearing in public. Prior to a speech, he rehearsed diligently so that he might sound spontaneous. He knew the value of the popular touch and usually succeeded in eliciting whoops of approval from his audience. Before long, he had come to consider himself a man of destiny—the next Napoleon, perhaps, or Augustus Caesar.

Swiss authorities, however, were unimpressed by the budding emperor. They viewed him as an irritant and kicked him out. Undaunted, he returned to Italy, where he penned a popular magazine serial about a lecherous cardinal,^fn1 edited Socialist newspapers, and began to develop a following. Speaking in smoke-filled halls, Mussolini warned workers that the elite classes would never relinquish their privileges without a fight and that no parliament would take their side against the bourgeoisie. The old answers, provided by religion or embodied in a sense of patriotic duty, had been exposed as false and should be abandoned. Justice, he said, could be obtained only through violent struggle. Revolution was essential.

Then, suddenly, it wasn’t. In the summer of 1914, with war in Europe imminent, Mussolini transformed himself without warning from a Socialist caterpillar into a patriotic butterfly. Rather than join his leftist comrades, who wanted nothing to do with a calamity generated, as they saw it, by upper-class imbeciles, he founded an independent newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, and urged Italy to enter the war. The turnabout may have stemmed from a sincere change of heart, because Mussolini’s ideological commitments were never deep, and pacifism was alien to his nature, but there are other possibilities. French business interests asked his help in pushing Italy into the struggle against Germany and Austria-Hungary and promised to reward him should that happen. Also, running a newspaper is expensive; weapons manufacturers were generous in financing Popolo d’Italia.

On May 24, 1915, Italy waded into war on the side of England and France. Mussolini was conscripted by the army and served honorably for seventeen months while writing weekly dispatches for his paper. He was promoted to corporal, then almost killed when a howitzer exploded during a training exercise, the shrapnel ripping dozens of holes in his guts. He was recuperating when, in October 1917, Italian forces suffered their most humiliating defeat. At the Battle of Caporetto, ten thousand were killed, thirty thousand were injured, and, in the face of enemy artillery, more than a quarter million surrendered.

Though the Italians were part of the eventual winning alliance, the fruits of their victory soon spoiled. The heavy casualties were difficult to absorb, but the pain became even worse when the country’s partners in Paris and London failed to deliver on secretly promised territorial concessions. They neglected even to invite Italy’s head of state, King Victor Emmanuel III, to the peace conference. These rebuffs strengthened the hand of Mussolini’s former leftist colleagues, who argued persuasively that they had been right to oppose the war. Membership in the Socialist Party swelled, and, in the 1919 parliamentary elections, it garnered more votes than any other.

Buoyed by their showing, but still excluded from the governing coalition, the Socialists were not content to sit quietly and vote on legislation. Democracy had instilled in labor ranks a deeper consciousness of rights than had existed in earlier times. The advance of technology had brought industrial workers together in large factories, making it easier for organizers to solicit support and for agitators to stir anger. Pressure built as the Socialists, inspired by Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, began an armed struggle to empower the proletariat and exterminate the bourgeoisie. The party hired gunmen to intimidate strikebreakers, assumed control of numerous municipal governments, and hoisted the red flag above manufacturing plants in Milan, Naples, Turin, and Genoa. In the countryside, Socialist peasants claimed the land they had long been tilling, sometimes murdering estate owners to spread terror and settle personal scores.

To the industrial and agricultural establishment, the protests were deeply unsettling. It was one thing for workers to demand a few more cents an hour, or fewer hours to earn the same weekly wage; it was another when they asserted the right to do away with bosses altogether, take and operate factories, and seize and redistribute land. The extremity of the tensions, the high stakes that were involved, and the blood already shed put barriers in the way of those trying to identify a middle ground. Politicians who sought to calm both sides were trusted by neither.

The rash of strikes and the strife over land played havoc with the Italian economy, causing prices to soar while food shortages grew, basic public services broke down, and railroads—hindered by labor disputes—ran hours, and sometimes days or weeks, behind schedule. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of discharged combat veterans returned home only to be heckled instead of honored and frozen out of jobs that the trade unions had already locked up.

Italy was on the verge of falling apart. Parliament was regarded even by its members as a corrupt bazaar where favors were divvied out to those with political and social connections. As for Victor Emmanuel, he was tiny, timid, and indecisive. In twenty-two years as monarch, he had received the credentials of no fewer than twenty prime ministers. Mainstream political leaders quarreled incessantly among themselves but made almost no effort to communicate with the public at large. The times were ripe for a real leader, a duce, who could bring Italy together and make it once again the center of the world.

IN MILAN ON A RAINY SUNDAY MORNING, MARCH 23, 1919, A FEW dozen angry men crowded into a muggy meeting room of the Industrial and Commercial Alliance in Piazza San Sepolcro. After hours of talk, they stood, clasped hands, and pledged their readiness “to kill or die” in defense of Italy against all enemies. To dramatize their unity, they chose for their emblem the fasces, a bundle of elm rods coupled with an ax that in ancient times had represented the power wielded by a Roman consul. The manifesto they signed bore just fifty-four names, and their foray into electoral politics that autumn was barely noticed, but within a couple of years the Fascist movement had more than two thousand chapters, and Benito Mussolini was their leader.

The Fascists grew because millions of Italians hated what they were seeing in their country and were afraid of what the world was witnessing in Bolshevik Russia. In speech after speech, Mussolini offered an alternative. He urged his countrymen to reject the capitalists who wanted to exploit them, the Socialists who were bent on disrupting their lives, and the crooked and spineless politicians who talked and talked while their beloved homeland sank further into the abyss. Instead of pitting class against class, he proposed that Italians unite—workers, students, soldiers, and businesspeople—and form a common front against the world. He asked his supporters to contemplate a future in which those who belonged to his movement would always look out for one another, while the parasites who had been holding the country back—the foreign, the weak, the politically unreliable—would be left to fend for themselves. He called on his followers to believe in an Italy that would be prosperous because it was self-sufficient, and respected because it was feared. This was how twentieth-century Fascism began: with a magnetic leader exploiting widespread dissatisfaction by promising all things.

When the new decade arrived, the Socialists still enjoyed the most favorable position in parliament and had a substantial presence throughout the country. To counter them, the Fascists drew on the vast pool of jobless veterans to organize their own squads of armed men, Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Leagues), to shoot labor leaders, trash newspaper offices, and beat up workers and peasants. The gangs thrived because many in the police viewed them sympathetically and pretended not to be aware of the mayhem they were inflicting on leftist foes. Within months the Fascists were driving the Socialists out of cities and towns, especially in Italy’s northern provinces. To advertise their identity, they wore makeshift uniforms—a black shirt, green-gray pants, and a dark fez-like cap with tassel. The Socialists had them outnumbered, but the Fascists were gaining quickly and were even more ruthless in applying force.

Mussolini had no playbook from which to guide this burgeoning insurrection. He was the undisputed leader of a movement whose direction was not yet defined. The Fascists had developed long lists of goals, but they possessed no single bible or manifesto. To some of its enthusiasts, the fledgling party was a way to rescue capitalism and Roman Catholicism from the Leninist hordes; to others it meant defending tradition and the monarchy. For many it was a chance to bring glory back to Italy; and to quite a few it meant a paycheck and a green light to bash heads.

Mussolini’s own course was marked by zigs and zags. He took money from big corporations and banks, but he spoke the language of veterans and workers. He tried several times to patch relations with the Socialists, only to discover that his former colleagues didn’t trust him and the more extreme Fascists were furious at the attempt. As the political environment continued to worsen, he had to become ever more militant just to keep pace with the forces he purported to command. Asked by a reporter to summarize his program, Mussolini replied, “It is to break the bones of the democrats … and the sooner the better.” In October 1922, he decided to challenge the government directly by mobilizing Fascists from around the country. “Either we are allowed to govern,” he exclaimed to the party conference, “or we will seize power by marching on Rome.”

Given that centrist politicians were divided to the point of paralysis, the responsibility for countering Mussolini’s bold move rested on the narrow shoulders of King Victor Emmanuel. He had to choose between the Socialists who wanted to destroy the monarchy and the roughneck Fascists who might, he hoped, still prove malleable; the middle ground had collapsed. The army and the prime minister advised the king to block the Fascists’ proposed march, arrest Mussolini, and deal with the Socialists separately. The king refused at first, but changed his mind when Fascists began to occupy media sites and government buildings. At 2 a.m. on October 28, he ordered that the Fascists be stopped. Seven hours later, he reversed course again, apparently believing the Fascists could defeat the army, which at that point was almost certainly untrue.

With the military ordered to stand down and tens of thousands of Blackshirts gathering on the edge of the capital, Victor chose what he thought was the safest path. He sent a cable to Mussolini, who was waiting warily in Milan, asking him to Rome to replace the prime minister, who had lost his majority and was serving in the capacity of caretaker. So it was that Mussolini’s gamble paid off. In the space of a weekend, he leapt to the top of the political ladder, and achieved his aim without winning an election or violating the constitution.

On October 31, the five-hour March on Rome took place more as a celebratory parade than the putsch it signified. The event attracted a mixed group and defied any narrow stereotype about what a Fascist should look like or be. Among the marchers were fishermen from Naples striding alongside clerks and shopkeepers while wearing dark jerseys and pilot caps. Farmers from Tuscany wore hunting jackets. A sixteen-year-old high school student, Giovanni Ruzzini, lacked money to buy a new shirt and so dyed an old one black; he also salvaged a military helmet from the local dump. A fair number of those present were barefoot because they couldn’t afford shoes. One man brought along fifty hammer-and-sickle badges, taken, he insisted, from the bodies of dead Communists. The contingent from Grosseto was led by an eighty-year-old blind man who, a half century earlier, had stood with Italy’s greatest general, Garibaldi. Members of the boisterous crowd came equipped with antique muskets, pistols, old safari guns, golf clubs, scythes, table legs, daggers; one man carried an ox’s jawbone, and others lugged potentially lethal hunks of dried salt cod. Most walked, but a wealthy young man from Ascoli Piceno drove up with a machine gun mounted on his Fiat. From Foggia came fifty cavalrymen perched on plow horses. Among those welcoming Fascism and shouting “Viva Mussolini” that day were two hundred Jews.

Despite the impressive spectacle, the party’s political footing was not yet firm. Mussolini’s swift rise had left him vulnerable to an equally rapid fall. The parliament was still dominated by Socialists and liberals, and the conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace. But Mussolini, soon to be known as Il Duce, had a talent for theater and little respect for the courage of his adversaries. Two weeks after taking office, he made his first address to the legislature. He began by striding into the hall and raising his arm in a Roman salute.^fn2 Silently, he scanned the edges of the room, where well-muscled security guards from his own party were lined up on benches, fondling their daggers. Hands on his hips, Mussolini declared, “I could have turned this drab grey hall into a bivouac for my Blackshirts and made an end of parliament. It was in my power to do so, but it was not my wish—at least not yet.”

With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.

From the outset, Mussolini relished the job of governing. He never worked as hard as his publicists suggested, but neither was he a dilettante. Aside from epic-level philandering, a love of swimming, and a taste for swordplay, he had few outside interests. He sought to govern well, but to do that, he felt the need to rule absolutely. He had full trust in his own judgment, and there was no satiating his hunger for power.

In 1924, Mussolini pushed through an electoral law that put Fascists in control of parliament. When the leader of the Socialists produced evidence of vote rigging, he was kidnapped by thugs and murdered. By the end of 1926, Il Duce had abolished all competing political parties, eliminated freedom of the press, neutered the labor movement, and secured the right to name municipal officials himself. To enforce his edicts, he took control of the national police, expanded it, and multiplied its capacity to conduct internal surveillance. To constrain the monarchy, he claimed the power to approve any successor to the king. To mollify the Vatican, he shut down brothels and fattened the stipends of priests, but in return he gained the right to approve all bishops. Looking ahead, he turned schools into human factories, where black-shirted schoolboys marched with muskets, celebrated the prospect of a heroic death, and shouted the Fascist credo: “Believe! Obey! Fight!”

Mussolini told his mistress, “I want to make a mark on my era … like an alien with its claw.” To that dubious end, he exhorted Italians to abandon romantic conceptions about human equality and embrace what he referred to as “the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right,’ a Fascist century.” “Never before,” he said, “have the peoples thirsted for authority, direction, order, as they do now. If each age has its doctrine, then … the doctrine of our age is Fascism.”

Even an aroused citizenry can’t remain forever in a state of mobilization if it lacks a sense of forward movement. Mussolini supplied this through his grandiose rhetoric, which evoked the image of a dominant Italy, reborn with more spazio vitale (living space), holding sway throughout the Mediterranean. The road to this paradise was war, which Mussolini urged Italians to embrace, renouncing all comforts. “Live dangerously,” he beseeched them. To back his words, he embarked on an aggressive foreign policy that placed intense pressure on Albania, then invaded a nearly defenseless Ethiopia, the last independent kingdom in Africa. To raise money for this brutal venture, Italy’s women, led by Queen Elena, donated their wedding rings to be melted down into gold or exchanged for cash; Italian women abroad were encouraged to do the same, and thousands did. Mussolini described the Ethiopia expedition as “the greatest colonial war in all history.” When machine guns and poison gas forced that country to surrender, he called on his people to “raise up your banners, stretch forth your arms, lift up your hearts and sing to the empire which appears in being after fifteen centuries on the fateful hills of Rome.”

Mussolini was not a keen judge of individuals, but he was sure he knew what the mass of people wanted: a show. He compared the mob to women who are helpless (he fantasized) in the presence of strong men. He posed for pictures in the government-controlled media while driving a sports car, standing sans shirt in a wheat field, riding his white stallion, FruFru, and posing in his military uniform, complete with shiny boots and a chest bedecked with medals. He accepted invitations to every wedding, factory opening, and patriotic event his schedule would allow.

When giving a speech, he stood on a small platform (as I do) to appear taller. He sometimes claimed credit (as I do not) for the sun breaking through the clouds just prior to an address. In addition to the inevitable Blackshirts, his usual audience included soldiers in khaki field uniforms, peasant women in white-sleeved dresses, and members of the squadristi, the Fascist veterans of the early days, wearing red-and-yellow sashes. To the side might be a small group of foreign reporters who would be pointed to and mocked by preliminary speakers, then greeted by the audience with catcalls and boos. Finally, in the words of a contemporary witness, “when Signor Mussolini stepped out, the crowd seemed to lift itself up as bayonets, daggers, caps and handkerchiefs were waved in the air amid deafening shouts.”

During the peak years of his reign, the great man’s image was displayed on products ranging from hair tonic and baby food to lingerie and pasta. When a would-be assassin shot him in the nose, he slapped on a bandage and went ahead, later the same day, with a speech to a conference of surgeons, telling them that he would now put himself in their hands. He commissioned street banners bearing the declaration IF I ADVANCE, FOLLOW ME; IF I RETREAT, KILL ME; IF I DIE, AVENGE ME! He put foundries to work building a bronze statue, never completed, of a 260-foot-tall figure looking down on the cupola of Saint Peter’s, its body that of a half-naked Hercules and its face a dead ringer for Il Duce.