From Fascism to Democracy : Culture and Politics in the Italian Election Of 1948 [1 ed.] 9781442675070, 9780802087683

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FROM FASCISM TO DEMOCRACY

CULTURE AND POLITICS IN THE ITALIAN ELECTION OF 1948

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FROM FASCISM TO DEMOCRACY Culture and Politics in the Italian Election

of 1948

Robert A. Ventresca

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8768-X

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Ventresca, Robert A. (Robert Anthony), 1970From fascism to democracy : culture and politics in the Italian election of 1948 / Robert A. Ventresca. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8768-X 1. Italy. Parlamento - Elections, 1948. 2. Italy - Politics and government 1945-1976. 3. Catholic Church - Italy - Political activity. I. Title. II. Series. DG577.5.V45 2004

324.945'0924

C2003-902542-X

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For my parents, Domenico and Rita Ventresca And my grandparents, Gino and lolanda Ventresca and Guglielmo and Margherita Sciarra

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations: Italian Political Parties, 1944-1948 Introduction

xiii

3

1 The Legacy of Fascism: Redefining Italy after Mussolini 24 2 Guns, Butter, and Good Ole Yankee Know-How: America's Crusade to Defeat Italian Communism 61 3 Madonnas, Miracles, and the Pulpit as Soapbox: The Use of the Sacred in the Campaign for Christ 100 4 Salerno Betrayed: Italian Communism from Participation to Confrontation 138 5 When Politics Reaches the Altar: Catholic Action Gets Out the Vote 177 6 Battle of the Senses: The Propaganda War 197 7 A Free and Fair Election? The Campaign 8 The Day After

236

213

viii

Contents Epilogue: Politics in a New Key or Blocked Democracy?

Appendix: On Elections: Voting in 1948 Notes

285

Selected Bibliography Illustration Credits Index

339 343

345

Illustrations follow page 210

273

262

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of numerous individuals to whom I am indebted. It might appear commonplace to say so, but it is nonetheless true that without their help this book could never have been written. This book began as a doctoral dissertation for the Department of History at the University of Toronto. My doctoral supervisor, Michael Marrus, deserves much of the credit for the genesis of the topic, and for steering a clear path towards completion of the project. Without his gentle prodding, I might still be wandering around Italy looking for something to write about. Professor Marrus was a model supervisor. If only every graduate student could benefit from his exemplary guidance. Franca lacovetta, Ron Pruessen, and Michael Bliss also of the University of Toronto provided valuable insights as readers of the dissertation. I especially want to thank Franca lacovetta, who first inspired me to consider graduate studies, and who showed me the ropes of academic life. She was a mentor who became a friend, and I am deeply grateful for all her support. I am thankful to King's College, University of Western Ontario - my alma mater - for providing the moral and material support to help me see this book through to completion. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of History, and in particular to Ruth Compton-Brouwer for leading by example and practising our craft with integrity and dedication. Ruth, too, has become a mentor and a friend, and her unwavering support over the past several years has meant more to me than she will ever know. Acknowledging her here is but a small way to thank her for all she does.

x

Acknowledgments

Of course, I am indebted to the work of countless other historians and archivists, most of whom I will never meet, but whose work I build upon in the pages that follow. As external examiner of my doctoral dissertation, Victoria De Grazia of Columbia University offered many corrections, suggestions, and alternative interpretations. I also want to record my thanks to the research staff who facilitated my research at the various archives and libraries in Italy, the United States, and Great Britain. Financial assistance was made possible by various agencies, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto. I also benefited enormously from a year in Italy as part of the University of Toronto-University of Siena exchange program. Perhaps no single individual has helped carry me more through completion of this book, in a concrete sense, than my editor, Ron Schoeffel at University of Toronto Press. Though we usually dealt with each other electronically, Ron was a source of constant support and encouragement. The other members of the UTP's team also deserve special mention, in particular editor Frances Mundy and the copyeditor Kate Baltais. Possibly no stage in the publication process is as involved, and as revealing, as copyediting. For their conscientious reading and correction of the manuscript, Frances and Kate deserve to be listed as coauthors! The anonymous readers of my manuscript also deserve a special word of gratitude for helping make this a much better book. Finally, and above all, I thank my family. I am blessed to belong to an incredibly durable and lively network of aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides of the Atlantic. Although they may have played a marginal role in the nitty gritty of research and writing, they are the bedrock upon which all my professional activities are based. In Italy, the Sciarra-Brunetti family provided moral and material support and taught me to appreciate the enduring vitality of Italian life. In Canada, there are too many people to thank by name, but I trust that they know who they are. Yola came into my life just in time to provide the balance and emotional support I needed to see the book through to completion. Fatefully, my uncle Ruben Sciarra passed away the very day the copyedited version of the manuscript reached my desk. I want to remember in a particular way his role in keeping alive the memory of a time and place that continues to nurture my interest in things Italian. He now knows how grateful I am for all that he did, and for all that he was. Rzposa in pace. My brother Carm and my sister Annie help to keep me grounded with

Acknowledgments

xi

their daily doses of reality and by helping me to laugh at myself. They make it fun to come home, time and again. This book is dedicated to my parents and grandparents, six ordinary people who, with modesty and selflessness, did rather extraordinary things. Their lives, which span more than a century, stand for all that is good and noble and enduring in an age of destruction, dislocation, and change. Together, they have taught me more about modern Italy than any book ever could - of the richness of Italy's traditions and the resourcefulness of its people, and of the country's great potential squandered, it seems, at the expense of its most industrious and loyal citizens. In the nineteenth century, the men who unified Italy boasted of having 'made Italy,' and in the twentieth, Mussolini tried to complete the task by 'making Italians.' Like most ordinary people, my parents and grandparents simply made do. Difficult though it was, making do meant making history. And they did. This book, with much love, is for them.

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Abbreviations: Italian Political Parties, 1944-1948

AD BNL CLN DC DDL MSI PCI PDA PLI PNF PNM PPI PRI PSI

Alleanza Democratica del Lavoro (monarchist) Blocco nazionale per la Liberia (monarchist) Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy) Democrazia del Lavoro Movimento sociale italiano (Italian social movement) Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party) Partito d'Azione (Action Party) Partito Liberale Italiano (Italian Liberal Party) Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) Partito Nazionale Monarchic© (National Monarchist Party) Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Liberal Party) Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican Party) Partito Socialista Italiano (EST. 1892, it fractured into two different socialist parties after 1921, one revolutionary, the other reformist. The revolutionary wing of the PSI went on to establish the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in 1921. PSLI Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani (est. January 1947, after break with the revolutionary wing of the PSI. PSIUP Partito Socialista di unita proletaria (est. 1930; offspring of the Italian Communist Party which saw its ranks split between revolutionary and reformist wings in 1921. The reformist wings eventually coalesced into the PSIUP. The Italian Socialists saw their ranks divided in 1947, between revolutionary and reformist wings. The revolutionary wing assumed the name

xiv

UQ

Abbreviations

Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) in January 1947, while the reformist wing took the name Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani (PSLI). Uomo Qualunque (Any Man Party)

FROM FASCISM TO DEMOCRACY: CULTURE AND POLITICS IN THE ITALIAN ELECTION OF 1948

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Introduction

The spirit of analysis has come upon nations only as they matured; and when they at last conceived of contemplating their origin, time had already obscured it, or ignorance and pride had surrounded it with fables behind which the truth was hidden. We must begin higher up; we must watch the infant in his mother's arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind ... we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which will rule his life. Alexis de Toqueville (1835)'

The chapters that follow tell the story of Italy's transition to democracy after the Second World War. Liberation brought to an end two decades of dictatorship by the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) of il Duce, Benito Mussolini. The birth of the postwar political system in Italy will be studied through the lens of a single event: the Italian national election of 1948. The Republic of Italy was inaugurated at the start of 1948 and the first parliamentary election of the republican era was held on 18 April 1948. Voter participation was tremendous with more than 90 per cent of eligible voters casting their ballots. This was a remarkable turnout for a country that had not known free and fair elections in twenty years. Several minor political parties were on the ballot forms, including the

4

From Fascism to Democracy

Partito Liberale Italiano (PLI), the party of former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, and the neo-fascists of the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI). The election was essentially, however, a contest between Democrazia Cristiana (DC) and the Fronte Democratico Popolare. The Italian Popular Front was a Marxist coalition comprising the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) and the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), together with a few smaller parties of the revolutionary left. The historian Gianni Corbi has characterized the 1948 election as 'the most passionate, the most important, the longest, the dirtiest, and the most uncertain electoral campaign in Italian history.'2 Indeed, the 1948 election was not so much about 'issues' as it was about 'ideology.' The vote was between two competing, indeed clashing visions of Italian society. The choice was between a conservative, Roman Catholic, capitalist Italy as envisioned by the governing Christian Democrats and a revolutionary, secular, socialist Italy as envisioned by the Popular Front.3 This clash of ideologies left little room for any middle ground, as Italy's Marxist parties made a strong concerted bid to seize power at the ballotbox. From the left came the familiar battle cry against the Church, against the large landowners, against the captains of industry that, together, had robbed the working classes of that which the Popular Front promised to deliver them: land, bread, and peace. From the Catholic centre-right came the sensational claim that 'the communists eat their children,' a declaration made to seem less sensational, perhaps, by news of Soviet repression in Eastern Europe. If there is one point about 1948 on which contemporary observers and historians agree, it is surely that the character and outcome of the campaign were in large measure determined by factors beyond the control of Italian politicians. The Christian Democrats relied on the moral and financial support of the Roman Catholic Church. True, the DC, also known as the Catholic party, had always drawn support from the Vatican and from Roman Catholic clergy dispersed throughout Italy. The involvement of the Vatican in the 1948 election campaign, however, marked a break with the past, by assuming the form of a planned and studied intervention. Pope Pius XII made no secret of how the leaders of the Church expected the faithful to vote when the time came. Indeed, well over a year before the election, the pope declared from the balcony of St Peter's that the political choice Italians faced was to be 'either with Christ or against Christ.' For Italian voters, unlike for voters in established Western democracies, the choice was not between political parties or philosophies, but between heaven and hell. That was the essence of

Introduction

5

the pontiffs admonition. In the overwhelmingly Catholic country that was Italy in 1948, the pope's intervention into electoral politics could not but influence the hearts - and votes - of many of the devout Catholics. There was also U.S. intervention. For months before the election, the administration of President Harry Truman had been sending not so subtle hints to Italian voters, reminding them of the American role in the Liberation and of American aid to war-tattered Italy in the form of food, coal, and capital. As election day got closer, and with support for the Popular Front apparently growing, making a left victory seem likely, the Truman administration made it clear that, although Italians were free to vote for whomever they wished, they had better choose carefully because there were no guarantees that a 'red' Italy would continue to benefit from U.S. generosity. Just one month before the election, Secretary of State George Marshall publicly declared that the economic aid package that bore his name was not unconditional. Despite the left's assertion that a Popular Front government would continue to participate in the Marshall Plan, the Truman administration made no such assurances. In the campaign to save Italy from falling into communist hands, the United States left no stone unturned. All manner of American aid was sent to Italy in the first months of 1948. Millions of dollars were secretly channelled to the Christian Democrats and the democratic socialist Unita Socialista, while shipments of U.S. military equipment secretly made their way to Italian security forces. The United States even made plans for a possible military intervention in Italy in the event of trouble. It was in the campaign to defeat the Italian Popular Front in 1948 that the United States first put to use a variety of national security mechanisms, including the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, which mounted its first major covert operation in Italy. The purpose of this operation was to help secure the vote for Christian Democracy. In this sense, U.S. intervention in the Italian 1948 election campaign was a defining moment in the evolution of American foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War. U.S. intervention and the mobilization of Catholic support on the initiative of the Vatican, with the help of the lay organization Catholic Action, constituted two formidable obstacles to the Popular Front. Making matters worse for frontists were events in Central Europe, Czechoslovakia in particular. In February 1948 Communists took over the government and initiated a campaign of repression that paved the way for Czechoslovakia's absorption into the Soviet bloc. For opponents of the Popular Front, events in Czechoslovakia were a powerful electoral weapon, providing what seemed like a concrete example of what would

6

From Fascism to Democracy

happen in Italy should the Popular Front come to power. At the same time, communist and socialist leaders in Italy defended the Czech coup as a victory for democracy. They rationalized that the violation of civil rights was a necessary and just response to a reactionary threat sustained by Western imperialist (that is, American) interests. Such a response to the events in nearby Czechoslovakia probably damaged the credibility of the Popular Front, planting the seeds of suspicion in the minds of undecided and uncommitted voters who might otherwise have been persuaded by the Popular Front's promise of moderation. Frontists, however, saw things differently. They saw no reason to hide their pleasure at events in Czechoslovakia, and some frontists, especially communists, took the Czech coup as a sign of things soon to pass in Italy itself. Discussions with Moscow intensified about what would happen not if, but when, the Popular Front claimed victory in April. Such was the widespread certainty in left circles that they would win. On the eve of the election, communist and socialist politicians looked with confidence at the tens of thousands of supporters who crowded piazzas and lined the streets of cities and towns everywhere as tangible evidence that their time had come. All the greater was their disappointment and disbelief when all the votes were counted, and the Christian Democrats declared the victors by a sizeable margin. Even the Soviet Union, whom frontist leaders dutifully obeyed despite claims of being independent, were resigned to the fact that Italy was, after all, a Western country. By electing the Christian Democrats, Italians had chosen the one political party destined to make it all the more so in the decades to come. The stark choice that faced the Italian voter on 18 April virtually erased one of the key features of the period from the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, namely, the collaboration between the major antifascist parties - in particular the DC, the PCI, and the PSI. This tripartite coalition effectively governed the liberated areas of Italy after 1943 and ran the Resistance movement in the Nazi-Fascist-occupied zones until the Liberation. After the war, between 1945 and 1947, the task of reconstruction and constitution-making was overseen by one executive, comprised of members of the very three parties that in 1948 were so bitterly divided into two camps. The dissipation of the collaborative spirit among the three mass-based parties that competed for power in 1948 did not happen overnight. Cracks in the unity of the antifascist coalition had emerged even before the war's end. At the heart of this tension was, in a word, ideology. Two camps, the left and right of the Italian political spectrum, preferred two

Introduction

7

radically opposed views of the country: the one presupposed a continuity with the traditional social and economic order, the other envisioned fundamental political, social, and economic transformation. It was the nascent Cold War that precipitated the destruction of the antifascist coalition, exposing the incompatibility of these two conceptions and rendering their harmonious coexistence within a single national government implausible, if not impossible. The 1948 vote was a defining moment in contemporary Italian history, with far-reaching implications for the subsequent evolution of democratic politics and institutions in Italy and Europe. Contemporary observers and scholars acknowledge that the 1948 election changed the face of Italian life irrevocably - some say for the better, others for the worse - in ways that are still apparent today. Remarkably, despite this widespread consensus, it is difficult to speak of a historiography of the election itself. In this regard it is telling that there is no single comprehensive scholarly study of this critical moment. This book fills a conspicuous hole in the literature on Italy's transition to democracy after the Second World War and the evolution of its trouble-ridden postwar political system. There are, to be sure, a few monograph-length studies that have the 1948 vote as their central focus. Santi Fedele's book entitled Fronte Popolare: La sinistra e le elezioni del 18 aprile 1948 can be considered an empirical study of the election, although it is hardly comprehensive. Fedele's monograph is rich in detail about the machinations and ideological struggles within left circles during the election campaign. But, if this is the book's greatest strength, it is also its principal weakness. There is virtually no consideration here of the Christian Democrats' campaign or other dimensions of Catholic involvement. An important contribution to the historiography of the 1948 campaign is Francesco Bonini's book entitled La grande contrapposizione: Aspetti delle elezioni del 1948 a Reggio Emilia. Bonini's study, like Fedele's, is limited in scope. It represents a local history of the election campaign in the province of Reggio Emilia, one of the reddest regions of Italy. Carefully researched and well documented, it shows how the 1948 campaign was experienced on the ground. At the same time, like any truly good local history, it draws the necessary connections to the broader national and international contexts. Most important, Bonini's is among the first studies to consider the 1948 election as a study of origins: through an examination of 1948, Bonini writes, 'we are able to discern the original lines of the republic.'4

8

From Fascism to Democracy

Another indispensable scholarly investigation of 1948 is Mario Casella's work en tided 18 aprile 1948: La mobilitazione delle organizzazioni cattoliche. This offers a detailed look at the activities of Catholic lay organizations in the 1948 campaign. Casella's book is densely written and extensively documented. He has mined the archives of Catholic Action and, like the very body he studies, Casella leaves no stone unturned in his account of the organization of consensus and voter mobilization by Catholic groups in the weeks and months before 18 April 1948. Like many contemporary observers did immediately after the election, Casella argues that the contribution of Catholic organizations to Christian Democracy's victory in 1948 was decisive, if difficult to measure. Many of the DC saw things differently. Nevertheless, Casella's study, like my own research, makes it difficult to deny the profound influence of organized Catholicism in 1948. Other scholarly works on the election are article length and thus focus necessarily on one aspect or another of this contentious period.5 Consequently, many of the more salient aspects are missed, such as electioneering tactics, the mobilization of voters - many of whom had never known free and democratic elections — the courting of the women's vote, or the ingenious, often novel, and colourful use of the mass media by both sides to get the vote out. Significantly, in the English language, no more than a handful of articles and unpublished theses broach the topic of the 1948 Italian election in a serious manner.6 Much more prolific than scholars in describing and analysing the vote have been the contemporary actors themselves. Their proximity to the events in question is, at the same time, the greatest strength and the principal weakness of their interpretations. In this sense, their commentaries are not so much historiographical as they are historical, invaluable primary sources to be mined with profit by the historian. So scattered and random are the reflections and research on the period that it is commonplace for historians to speak of a 'historiographic oblivion' into which 1948 seems to have fallen. Italian historians and their English-speaking colleagues often complain that the 1948 election lacks a serious, discernible historiography, comparable to, say, that on the Resistance or the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s. The year 1948, Francesco Bonini concludes, 'remains territory uncharted by historiography.'7 In the preface to Bonini's local history of 1948, the famous historian Pietro Scoppola observes that 'for some time, 18 April 1948 has remained in the long shadow of historiographic oblivion or, more precisely, it has suffered from an irresistible tendency to be dis-

Introduction

9

missed.'8 In his review of the scattered literature on 1948, the historian Lamberto Mercuri speaks repeatedly of the 'neglect,' 'silences,' and 'disinterest,' surrounding the election, especially among scholars.9 Why the silences, the neglect, and the seeming lack of interest? A pragmatic answer is that the events in question are simply too close to our own time to permit the dispassionate, detached study that is the hallmark of professional historical scholarship. There is, indeed, a practical consideration at work here. After all, barely more than fifty years have passed since the election and much historical documentation, perhaps the most relevant and revealing evidence, is simply not yet available. In an attempt at a definitive account of the role of, say, the CIA in this election campaign, the historian is immediately confronted with the fact that full access to CIA records for the period and country in question has yet to be granted. Consequently, on a topic of such importance and interest to specialists and non-specialists alike, we are forced to make observations and deduce conclusions on the basis of limited documentary evidence - often of questionable authenticity - or, even worse, on the basis of unsubstantiated hearsay. The proximity of the 1948 election to our own time presents other, less technical obstacles to sound historical analysis. In Italy, the date 18 April 1948 is as much living memory as it is a subject of history. As the Italian historian Giovanni De Luna observes, with the 1948 campaign 'the lines of memory and research coincide perfectly.' In Italy today, both the right and the left, the victors and the vanquished respectively, remember 18 April 1948 as a singular event, as something quite unlike traditional electoral contests in Western democracies. But that is where the consensus ends and the debate over the legacy of 18 April 1948 begins. For the vanquished, the memory of 1948 feeds what De Luna calls a 'desire for eternal revenge.' For the victors, by contrast, the memory of that pivotal election underscores what De Luna describes as 'the satisfaction of victory and a consciousness of power.'10 That which is not relegated to the annals of history becomes an active agent in contemporary debates: hard feelings die hard, old wounds are slow to heal, and scars do not disappear. Indeed, after 1948 it was difficult for the campaign to become an object of history precisely because, as Francesco Bonini puts it, the debate over 18 April 1948 remained 'too burning and open,' while the domestic and international contexts that obtained in 1948 lasted for close to fifty years. 'Notwithstanding some notable changes,' Bonini writes, 'the political protagonists of that era ... remained the same.' This was also true of the

10

From Fascism to Democracy

international situation.11 Only the fall of communism,and the sweeping transformations that followed in Europe after 1989, shook the political world Italians had known since 1948 to the point where it all came crashing down. The blurring of the lines between the history of 1948 and the memory of the election produced a historiography that resembled the ideological polarization that had characterized the transition period and the election itself. Since 1948 political commentators and scholars have tended to split into two discernible camps — those who espoused an interpretation of 1948 from the standpoint of the victors and those who interpreted the election and its implication from the standpoint of the vanquished. The history of the period they produced invariably reflected this more general polarization of Italian society. What both camps shared, however, was the view that the 1948 campaign, its conduct and its outcome, was inescapably, almost exclusively, about one thing - communism, and the array of social, economic, religious, and political forces that jousted to see communism triumph or, conversely, eradicated entirely. Everything that transpired in 1948, the orthodoxy goes, followed from the antithesis between communism and its powerful mortal enemies. Too often, then, speculation and rhetoric substitute for sound evidence and measured reflection on the history of 1948. With this book, I want to begin to change that. In doing so, I reject the conventional explanation of the outcome of the campaign: Vatican intervention, plus U.S. intervention, plus events in Eastern Europe, plus the Cold War, equals 18 April 1948 in Italy. This conventional interpretation of the 1948 Italian election, evident in much of the literature and very much alive today in the memory culture of the left, is incomplete and superficial. Perhaps some clarification, or rather precision, is in order. When I say I reject the conventional explanation of the outcome of the campaign, I mean just that - it is the outcome we are talking about. How was it that the Christian Democrats won such a decisive victory at the ballot-box, in spite of widespread expectations that the left was coasting to victory? Did the CIA 'buy' the election for Alcide De Gasperi and Christian Democracy? Did the Vatican cajole and intimidate the faithful into voting en masse against the heathen revolutionaries? For many people, then and now, the answer to those questions is a resounding Yes .'This indication of the spin the vanquished put on the outcome came within weeks of the momentous vote. At the top of the agenda of the Italian Communist Party executive meeting in the first week of May 1948 was the question of

Introduction

11

electoral fraud, what its leader Palmiro Togliatti caustically referred to as the 'gerrymandering, the swindles' that had helped to steal victory from the Popular Front. There were other factors as well, Togliatti readily admitted: police violence, intimidation, a massive military presence in many towns and cities, as well as those pesky letters from relatives in America, and the pressure from the men in black (the clergy). Yet, there is no room for the agency of ordinary voters in this interpretation of events, which is surprising for a man who spent a lifetime planning to help ordinary folk get what was theirs. Hence, my claim to contest the interpretation, so prevalent among so many observers of postwar Italy, that reduces what happened in Italy between Mussolini's downfall and the 1948 election to a product of external (read here American) imposition. Commentators and scholars sympathetic to the vanquished of 1948 have produced what can be called a 'fatalistic' interpretation. This view sees the victory of Christian Democracy in April 1948 as the culmination of a wider process of conservative restoration that began with the work of the Constituent Assembly and the end of tripartite coalition government in May 1947. The events that led up to and culminated in a clear defeat of the Popular Front in 1948, the argument goes, made up the flawed genetic code that was to afflict the postwar republic in the form of high-level corruption, government instability, legislative immobility, and worse. In this version of events, it was the defeat of the Popular Front and the subsequent exclusion of communists from government (despite their mass following and parliamentary presence in the decades after 1948) that more than any other single event stunted the evolution of Italy's political culture and institutions after Fascism. And, the argument goes, the defeat of the Popular Front brought an abrupt end to the process of democratization and progressive social change released by the Resistance and enshrined, nominally, in the new Italian Constitution which came into effect at the start of 1948. The 1948 election, some would and do maintain, paved the way for the reconstitution - behind the facade of the centrist Christian Democrats - of the Fascist-era conservative-reactionary coalition comprised of the Church, large landowners, industrialists, and the middle classes, united by anticommunism.12 Taken to its extreme, this interpretation sees the outcome of 1948 as the cause of all that was, and is, wrong in contemporary Italian society. As the historian Mario Rossi puts it, oblivious perhaps to the ancient and variegated roots of contemporary Italy, the legacy of 18 April 1948 runs from the 'blocked democracy' to the systemic shortcomings of Italian bureaucracy, tax evasion, organized

12

From Fascism to Democracy

crime, unemployment, the crisis of the justice system, schools, public services, and, finally, the persistent problem of social and economic disparities between Italy's north and south. My point is a very simple one. At every step of the way, Italians were makers of their own destiny, albeit within certain limits. To be sure, those limits included, as we will see, CIA 'dirty tricks,' covert American funding, and the spreading tensions of the Cold War, accelerated by events such as the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Yet, in the final analysis, on 18 April 1948 Italians were free to vote for whomever they wished. They did just that, based on a calculation of their interests and that of their families, communities, and, ultimately, of their country. But there is more to this business of rejecting the conventional interpretations of the 1948 election. A central premise of this book is that an election is a discrete event; a cultural artefact of sorts. When I speak of the need to move beyond the conventional treatment of the 1948 election, I mean to offer a different methodological and interpretative framework with which to understand what is, on the surface, a political event. The inadequacies of the conventional interpretation, therefore, invariably reflect the shortcomings of the conventional approach with which historians and other commentators have studied 1948. Indeed, where some historians speak of a 'historiographic oblivion' into which 1948 has fallen, I contend that it is more appropriate to speak of a historiographic inertia — a tendency to assume, as one Italian colleague put it to me bluntly, that everything there is to be said about 1948 has already been said. Indeed, a great deal has been written about the 1948 election in Italy. It is difficult to think of a general survey of postwar Italian or European history that does not make at least passing mention of it. Students of U.S. foreign policy are doubtless familiar with the 1948 election. At the very least, they know that it was a watershed in the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in the early Cold War and that it helped determine Italo-American relations after the Second World War. It came as no surprise to me, then, when political and diplomatic historians in both Italy and the United States alike tried to dissuade me from pursuing this topic, gently suggesting that the relevant sources had already been well researched and that, for all the new material one might uncover, the overarching interpretations and conclusions about 1948 were unlikely to change. That may be so, I reasoned, if one believes that the election was simply a political event - the story of politicians, party brokers, and diplomats jostling for power. I, for one, do not. An election campaign, like much of what goes on in democratic politics, may appear

Introduction

13

on the surface to be of, by, and for politicians. However, an election campaign is no more detached from society than are the social, cultural, and economic forces that define the daily lives of its citizens. Ultimately, an election campaign, like any political event, is as much a reflection of all of these realities as it is a determining influence. In a democracy, an election is, at heart, a form of societal self-expression. An election can act as a lightning rod for the deep-seated tendencies and contradictions of the present, not to mention the unresolved struggles of the distant and not-so-distant past. Therefore, it should be possible to write a social and cultural history of a general election. This book attempts to do just that. Doubtless, some readers who look to this book for new and surprising conclusions about 1948 will come away disappointed. My study provides no great paradigm shift, no breathtakingly original reinterprelation of the period that runs from the fall of Mussolini in 1943 to that anxious moment when millions of Italian voters cast their ballots on 18 April 1948. Why, then, should anyone care to read this book? The aims here are exceedingly modest. My objective as a historian is, in the words of Marc Bloch, to enrich our 'picture of the past.' One of the most articulate spokesmen of the historian's craft, Bloch readily admitted that the past, by definition, never changes: it is, put simply, a 'datum which nothing in the future will change.'13 The past itself is one thing; our knowledge of it is another matter. Knowledge of the past, wrote Bloch, is 'progressive,' something that is 'constantly transforming and perfecting itself.' How so? 'The ingenuity of the scholars in further ransacking the libraries or in opening new excavations on ancient sites,' Bloch counselled, 'is neither the sole nor, perhaps, even the most effective means of enriching our picture of the past. Hitherto unknown techniques of investigation have also come to light.'14 How, then, does this book enrich our picture of Italy's recent past? For one, the chapters that follow reflect my attempt to provide a multilayered analysis of a political event. I have attempted to write political history with society and culture written back in, or, conversely, social history with the political written back in - in short, history from both the top down and the bottom up. This is a kind of histoire totale that weaves together the broad political and diplomatic narrative of 1948 with the social and even psychological dimensions that determined how the election was experienced at the grassroots. I want to widen the notion of what is 'political' to understand how factors such as popular piety, gender, and historical memory, for instance, were manipulated for political

14

From Fascism to Democracy

ends and how they, in turn, conditioned the conduct of the 1948 campaign, as well as its outcome. This approach is apparent throughout the book, but finds perhaps its clearest expression in my discussion of how the sacred images and devotional practices of Italian Catholicism were used by the clergy to mobilize Catholic voters. The political use of religious icons like the Virgin Mary, I argue, would all have been for naught but for the fact that Italians were already well versed in the political use of sacred images. Borrowing from the historian Mario Isnenghi, I consider this intersection of the religious and the political to be a constant in Italian history, a fact that leads Isnenghi to argue that the 1948 campaign 'comes from far back.'15 Indeed, I understand the question of origins to have two very different, if related, meanings. On the one hand, the chapters that follow are informed by the Toquevillian notion that a political system, like a nation, inevitably bears some mark of its origins in the sense of a historically specific moment in time that is shaped by actors, events, chance, and circumstance. I also understand the question of origins to mean roots the cultural, social, even psychological underpinnings that both determined and conditioned how ordinary Italians and their political leaders, as well as foreign policy-makers acted in the heady climate of 1947-8. I take my lead here from the historians Mario Isnenghi and Carlo Ginzburg. In an obscure article on the 1948 election in the fervently Catholic Veneto region in northeastern Italy, published in 1977, Isnenghi interpreted the Christian Democratic victory not merely as the product of foreign, namely, American intervention, conditioned by events in places such as Czechoslovakia. Instead, Isnenghi spoke of 1948 as having 'deep roots' that were 'indigenous' to Italy. The nature of the 1948 election campaign and its outcome, in other words, could best be explained in terms of Italy's unique position as seat of the universal Roman Church and the age-old intersection between the civic and the religious in daily life and in official public discourse. Although Isnenghi does not say so explicitly, the implication of his argument is clear - the Church's participation in the campaign to defeat the Popular Front in 1948, and the secular resistance to clerical involvement in the political affairs of the state, was but a recent manifestation of the deep-seated tendencies and tensions of Italy's uneasy history as seat of two universal institutions, one temporal, the other religious.16 We might say, therefore, that 1948 reflected one of the abiding continuities of modern Italian history. Clerical intervention of an organized, official sort - as with the grand

Introduction

15

Marian pilgrimages of the pre-election period - is only one side of the equation, one dimension of Catholic responses to the crisis created by the Popular Front's drive for power. We still have to deal with popular responses among the Catholic masses to political events in 1948. The compelling question is why scores of Italians claimed to experience apparitions and miracles in the weeks before the vote? Why did so many people who did not see or hear or feel any supernatural sign, nevertheless believe these claims to be true? How was it that even the mainstream national media, from newspapers to public radio, reported on the visions and miracles as fact, throwing caution and scepticism to the wind? What are we to make of the few parish priests who, it was reported after election day, stood outside the polling stations brandishing crucifixes and encouraging parishioners to kiss the feet of Jesus before casting their votes? For many years, scholars have dismissed these questions as historically inconsequential, seeing the phenomena of apparitions and miracles as merely the product of individual and at times collective delusion deserving of the scholars' derision, not serious consideration. I argue that just the opposite is the case. Such phenomena of a seemingly inconsequential, irrational, even trivial nature may actually permit, as Carlo Ginzburg puts it, 'the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality.'17 In the nineteenth century, Italian art expert Giovanni Morelli developed a new method to ascertain the authorship of paintings attributed to the old masters. He did this by paying close attention not to the most obvious characteristics of a given piece of art, but to seemingly trivial details, such as ear lobes, fingernails, fingers, and toes. Ginzburg notes that even Sigmund Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis owed much to the Morellian intrepretative method, because modern psychology, too, was 'accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations.'18 It is not my intention to submit the 1948 campaign to psychoanalysis, even less to a careful examination, figuratively speaking, of ear lobes, fingernails, and other such perhaps trifling matters. Indeed, much of what follows below focuses precisely on what Freud referred to as the 'general impression and main features of a picture,' insofar as the broad political and diplomatic narrative of 1948 is concerned. All the same, this study does draw the reader's attention to decidely minor details in attempting to arrive at what Ginzburg describes as 'a more profound, less obvious type of history.'19

16

From Fascism to Democracy

Put another way, what this book wants to do is explain simultaneously both the deeper causes and the distinctive features of 1948 in Italy. This is precisely what Georges Lefebvre accomplished in his classic work on the origins of the French Revolution. The 'ultimate cause' of the French Revolution of 1789, Lefebvre acknowledged, came from far back. It reached 'deep into the history of France and of the western world' and was born of the social structure of French society up to the eighteenth century. Although the power and wealth of the nobility and the clergy had declined dramatically by the mid-1700s, these groups continued to hold the highest position in the legal structure of the country. It ought not to have been so, because as Lefebvre bluntly put it, 'economic power, personal abilities and confidence in the future' rested with the rising bourgeoisie. It was this elementary 'discrepancy' in French society that 'caused' the French Revolution.20 This speaks to deeper causes, however, which are really only part of the story. Other countries in Europe, most notably England, had witnessed similar social revolutions, but these had been achieved without very much violence or threat to the established political order. Not so France where, as Lefebvre first wrote, the revolution was 'realized by violence.' How do we account for these 'special features' of the revolution in France? The simple answer is to look to the immediate causes, in particular, the collapse of the central authority which in other parts of Europe had been able to maintain control over events.21 Deeper causes and distinctive features are the stuff of history. With all historical events, there are causes that 'come from far back' - the longue duree — and there are causes that are unique and specific to a given moment in time and in a given place. The historian's task is to understand both and to determine, to the extent possible, how these interacted and thus explain why things turned out the way they did. If the deeper causes of events in Italy surrounding the election of 1948 are to be found in the enduring continuities of Italian history, principal among them being the intersection of the civic and the religious, then how do we account for the distinctive features of the 1948 campaign, to say nothing of its outcome? Which causes 'came from far back' and which were more immediate, and specific, to the particular circumstances of Italy, Europe, and the whole world in the late 1940s? What were the implications for events in Italy of the evolving Cold War between East and West? How did international events, such as the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, influence both the conduct and the outcome of the campaign? What role did domestic social and economic problems, such

Introduction

17

as unemployment and poverty, play in shaping events in Italy in 1948? What role did personality play in influencing how Italians cast their ballots on 18 April 1948? Just as a good biography is also the history of an era, so, too, can the study of a single political event - in this case, a convulsive, decisive election - tell a much larger story and teach us general lessons about the time, the people, and the place under consideration. A historical event, the French historian Marc Bloch once observed, 'can never be understood apart from its moment in time.'22 A history of the 1948 election campaign is at the same time a history of Italy's democratic renaissance. It tells us something about the legacy of Fascism, about the nature of the post-Second World War political system, about Church power and influence in Italian life; in short, about why Italians today have the imperfect but vibrant democracy that they have. When I arrived in Italy in the summer of 1996 to begin research for the chapters that follow, I had only the vague sense that my work would, like that of so many scholars before me, set off in search of democracy. I wanted to make sense of the hopelessly chaotic, bewildering nature of Italian politics, but more important, I was curious to know how it was that, for all its excesses and institutional deficiencies, Italian democracy actually worked as well as it did. Listening to ordinary Italians on the streets, in the markets, standing in line in the bank or at the post office, or crammed onto trams and buses, I was struck by the great Italian propensity to talk politics. Politics is everywhere in Italy: in newspapers, the television news, variety shows, theatre, cinema, to say nothing of the main theatre of Italian life, the piazza. Not even the great national passion for football (soccer) rivals the lively interest in the goings on of the politicians in Rome. Indeed, politics in Italy is a kind of sport - where you pick your team, wear its colours, and use your team's name as an adjective to tell others not who you cheer for, but who you are. In Italy, to the various matrices of identity, principal among them region and class, we can add politics, that is, political identity. If in most Western democracies, politics is something one does, in Italy politics is something one is. Might this be the source of Italy's seeming political chaos, I wondered? Or perhaps this was Italian democracy's saving grace? Yet, although they seem to talk of little else, Italians profess to disdain politics and, especially, politicians. As Joseph LaPalombara observes, 'Italian commentary on political leaders and institutions is typically offkey, atonal cacophony, not easy to comprehend. The fragments we hear suggest a dire situation. The clearest word filtering through the babble is

18

From Fascism to Democracy

la crisi, the crisis.'23 Italian democracy - how it works and why it often has not in the past fifty years or so - is an obsession of Italians and foreign observers. Perhaps this is because for much of the modern era, democracy has been so conspicuously absent in Italy or so often been found wanting. From the nineteenth-century project of building a nation-state on ancient foundations that were often inhospitable to the very notion of a unified Italy, to the elitist, narrowly based political system of the liberal era after unification, to the utter collapse of parliamentary democracy and then twenty years of authoritarian rule, to the hopelessly chaotic and notoriously unstable multiparty system of the post-Second World War era, Italians have always had a problem with democratic governance. In no period has this been truer than in the decades after Fascism. As LaPalombara puts it, looking at Italian politics in the contemporary era, 'We see in sharp focus little more than a long string of political excesses inflated ideological warfare, cabinet crises without end, tax evasion, corruption, the Mafia, terrorism, and the like. It is easy to write the system off as impossibly polarized, and easier still to marvel that even a modicum of democracy is found there.'24 Why write off a system that, for better or worse, through good times and in bad, actually works? Our task is to seek out origins, to determine the relationship between causes and effects, to measure change over time; in short, to explain how things got to be the way they are. There is a long tradition of using the study of the past to understand the workings of contemporary political institutions and political culture. For example, Alexis de Toqueville wrote his book Democracy in America as a form of political theory that used history to arrive at general observations and rules that could be applied to politics and society in the present.25 For Toqueville the study of the past was at the very heart of philosophical enquiry into the workings of political institutions and culture. 'The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child,' Toqueville wrote in the opening pages of the classic tome. The growth of nations, Toqueville reasoned, was no different in that 'they all bear some marks of their origins.' His own study of the origins of U.S. political institutions was a case in point. Tf we carefully examine the social and political state of America, after having studied its history,' Toqueville wrote, 'we shall remain perfectly convinced that not an opinion, not a custom, not a law, I may even say not an event is upon record which the origin of that people will not explain.'26 So it is with the social and political state of Italy in the period after the

Introduction 19

Second World War. The chapters that follow attempt to understand the workings of contemporary Italian political institutions and political culture by peering, so to speak, into the cradle of the child, that is, by examining the history of the brief period from the fall of Mussolini to the birth of the republican era and its baptism, as it were, in the 1948 election. Why did Italians get the kind of political system so many of them profess to despise? Why, if they despise it so, has the system shown such tenacity and durability? This book attempts to answer these questions. The following chapters are centrally concerned with the 1948 election as a formative moment in the political socialization of Italians to the democratic process after two decades of Fascist rule. This book contributes to the substantial literature on democratic transitions, a field of enquiry dominated by political scientists and sociologists.27 My debt to the social scientists will become evident, although readers will note that I have retained the historian's penchant for story-telling and a healthy scepticism of the utility of theoretical models. The 1948 election is widely considered to have been the last act in the transition to democracy after Mussolini was ousted in 1943. Undoubtedly, it was. April 1948 marked the effective inauguration of the postwar Republic of Italy, both in an institutional or technical sense (that is, parliament was once again up and running after some twenty years), but also and perhaps more importantly, in terms of culture and attitude. The 1948 election, Robert Leonardi notes, was decisive precisely for the consequences it had on 'the attitudes of Italian leaders and citizens towards themselves and their political institutions.' Most importantly, 'many of these attitudes persist up to the present moment.' 28 On one level, the relatively peaceful and orderly conduct of the 1948 election campaign and the calm that followed after 18 April underscored the widespread consensus among ordinary Italians and their leaders over the proper rules of the democratic game. For all the talk at the time of the threat to public order and the incessant rumours about the potential for communist-inspired violence or even a Soviet invasion, and for all the dramatic shows of state authority in the form of soldiers marching through towns and cities in every corner of Italy, police raids, and the mass seizure of arms held by private individuals, in the end Italians voted dutifully and peacefully, confident of their newly established freedoms and civic responsibilities. This was arguably the truest indication of Italy's democratic renaissance and the surest indication that Italian fascism was indeed forever dead and buried.

20

From Fascism to Democracy

Yet, in some respect, the 1948 election campaign was more of a bumpy beginning than a happy ending to the tragedy that befell Italy after 1922. After all, not everyone was satisfied with the conduct of the campaign, and even less with the result. Communists and revolutionary socialists complained that the election had been neither free nor fair, and the millions of Italians who voted for the Popular Front nurtured a similar sense that they had been duped into accepting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy. Close to half of the Italian electorate would nurture a sense of disaffecdon and alienation for decades after 18 April. This widespread and deeply seated disaffection had far-reaching consequences for Italian politics and society. There was little chance for the healthy evolution of parliamentary democracy in post-Fascist Italy so long as close to half of all voters consistently saw their political party unfairly excluded from power for more than forty years. The disaffecdon, alienation, and resentment that came to define Italian political culture in the period after the Second World War was an enduring legacy of 18 April 1948. As many scholars and pundits are fond of saying, Italy falls short of the mark on any number of indicators used to measure so-called healthy or normal democratic practice. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is political discourse. Joseph LaPalombara correctly observes that the 'language of polities' in Italy betrays the sense of a contested political system whose very legitimacy is constantly being called into question. Italian political discourse is 'full of ideological assertions, sweeping condemnadons of political opponents, and other expressions that suggest open warfare and irreconcilable conflict. Were one to read only the partisan press and to listen to speeches made in parliament or in the piazzas, one would quickly get the impression that, politically speaking, Italians are engaged in a war of all against all.'29 LaPalombara is referring here to the language of contemporary Italian politics, but his description could just as easily be applied to the 1948 election campaign itself. April 1948 taught Italians that their newborn political system was contested terrain. After 18 April 1948 the basic legitimacy of the republican system in Italy was constandy challenged, or so it appeared, from the left — from the communists, in particular - who would question the legitimacy of the 1948 results and constantly decry the absence of a regular alternation in government. The Italian Communist Party, we have seen, continued to grow in size and strength after April 1948. Part of this support came from Italians who, while perhaps declining to become paid members of the PCI, voted for Palmito Togliatti and his

Introduction

21

successors if only, as Denis Mack Smith puts it, 'as the outlet for a disaffection and alienation.' Where else could voters turn to register their opposition to the continued presence of the Church in the affairs of the state? Who other than the PCI, and to a lesser degree the PSI, could be counted on to act as a genuine opposition party when all the other major political parties, including the democratic socialists, Republicans, and Liberals, were themselves key figures of Christian Democrat-led governing coalitions? Despite its claims to be a voice for the disaffected and the alienated, the revolutionary left never attracted the critical mass of voters needed to actually win a majority in subsequent elections. Nevertheless, as Mack Smith correctly observes, the communists and revolutionary socialists continued to perform their 'residual function' as the conscience of the nation, as relentless critics of government policy, and as valiant defenders of the so-called progressive Constitution of 1948.30 In the process, they lent credibility to the very system that conspired to keep them from power. Although the PCI would be kept from power for close to fifty years, it continued to play a central role in the political life of Italy, and continued to infuse the language of Italian politics with the sort of inflamed rhetoric and sweeping ideological assertions LaPalombara describes. Not only was Marxism the preferred ideological flavour of artists, intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers - with the publication of Gramsci's prison notebooks in 1947-50, Marx was 'in' and Croce was 'out' in literary and artistic circles - but the PCI proved adept at local and regional politics as well. In the years after 1948, communists were elected to govern in important cities of central and northern Italy such as Bologna, Florence, Turin, Milan, and Genoa; the revolutionary left even came close to winning power in the city of Rome itself.31 In 1948 Italians proved the axiom that, in a democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve. The republic that followed the dictatorship of the Partito Nazionale Fascista may have been riddled with imperfections and contradictions, and saddled with corruption, instability, and debt, but a democracy it was nevertheless. That it remains so after a half-century of ideological excesses, foreign meddling, corruption, terrorism, and a rapid succession of governments that come and go in the blink of an eye is, on the surface, nothing short of miraculous. But that is on the surface only: in the final analysis, Italy's democracy is a house built of stone. In sifting through the pages that follow, readers are invited to remem-

22

From Fascism to Democracy

her the basic methodological premise of this book: the study of Italy's transition to democracy after Fascism, as viewed through the lens of the 1948 election, ought to be considered not simply as a political history of an essentially political event. Rather, it is an attempt at an histoire totaleof the period, weaving together the broad political and diplomatic narrative of 1948 with the historical, social, and even psychological dimensions that helped 'cause' the 1948 election and that determined its outcome. The various stages along the way from the demise of Mussolini to that tense day when millions of voters cast their ballots in April 1948 account for a different order of causation: the short term and the long term, the immediate and the longue duree. There is the account of a society struggling to cope with the pressing problem of rebuilding in the wake of the physical destruction of the Second World War, while also trying to redefine itself after more than twenty years of Fascist dictatorship. There is the account of the U.S. campaign to defeat the revolutionary left, which serves as a stark illustration of the extent to which Italy's domestic affairs were influenced by forces beyond its borders. This speaks to the immediate and distinctive feature of the postwar world: following the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, and given Italy's strategic position in the middle of Western Europe, and at the heart of the Mediterranean basin, the 1948 election was a prism through which the growing tensions of the nascent Cold War were refracted. By contrast, there is the account of the wave of Marian apparitions and grand pilgrimages that spread throughout Italy in the weeks before the vote. This phenomenon takes us back into Italy's more distant past, and prompts us to consider how the sacred images and age-old devotional practices of Italian Catholicism became intertwined with the political campaign to mobilize Catholic support around the Christian Democrats. I maintain that Catholic responses to the events of the early Cold War, and the secular resistance to clerical involvement in politics, were but a recent manifestation of the deeply seated tensions of Italy's uneasy but inescapable history as locus of two historic, universal institutions, one temporal, the other spiritual.32 We might say that 1948 reflected one of the abiding continuities of modern Italian history, albeit within the context of a historically novel set of changing circumstances; here, again, is the combination of the immediate and the longue duree, event and structure, deeper causes and distinctive features. In trying to understand the balance between the immediate and longterm factors, as well as the necessary context and analysis, one elementary fact should be kept in mind. The story of Italy's transition to

Introduction

23

democracy, culminating in the struggle for power at the ballot box on 18 April 1948, is just that - a story: a dramatic account of how Italy emerged from years of dictatorship and ruinous war, foreign occupation, and civil strife to redefine itself as a democratic republic and assume its rightful place as a major power in Europe. That Italy made this transition in spite of ideological extremism, violence, the threat of foreign invasion, and economic collapse is drama of the highest order, and a story worth telling. This book tries to do just that.

Chapter One

The Legacy of Fascism: Redefining Italy after Mussolini

Italy, dumb in the hands of the executioner, and discouraged by a series of abortive insurrections, has need of an encouraging voice. Nothing is wanting in my opinion to enable Italy to raise herself to a level with her destiny but the consciousness of her will and of her power. She has so often been told that she is weak, that she ought not to hazard attempts which are called premature, and that she must expect liberation from abroad. Giuseppe Mazzini1

The free soup kitchens of Genoa run out of food long before the customers' pails are filled. Ragged children dive under cafe tables for butts which their unemployed parents make into 'new' cigarettes ... and sell for fifty cents a package. In Florence, fifteen-year-old prostitutes hang outside the Allied hotels begging soldiers to pay. Nika Strmden (1948)2

Writing to the Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean Theatre in June 1945, just two months after the liberation of Italy, U.S. Admiral Ellery W. Stone warned that although the Second World War was over, Italy's status as a stable Western ally was far from assured. As in other European countries ravaged by war, Stone warned, Italy was 'fertile' ground for the emergence of a Soviet-inspired movement to bring the country into the Soviet sphere of influence if the Allies did not move quickly to help it along the road to economic and political reconstruction. 'Italy is at the parting of the ways,' wrote Stone.

The Legacy of Fascism

25

Defeated in 1943, she has been fought over and occupied by the Allies or Germans for two years; she has suffered civil war in the North where partisans have fought Fascists and Republican troops have been in battle against the new Italian Army. She is split into eight conflicting political parties with membership of less than ten percent of the population and no outstanding leader has come to the fore; she has had five Governments since September 1943; a million of her men have been in exile either as slave labor or as prisoners of war; more than half a million of her people have suffered dislocation of home; her financial position is precarious; her economy has been totally disrupted; she has no merchant fleet and few foreign markets; without coal and raw material she faces unemployment amounting to several millions; the country is full of arms illegally held ... Already there are signs that, if present conditions long continue, Communism will triumph - possibly by force.3

The Allies had good reason to worry. Twenty years of sometimes benign, often bumbling dictatorship by the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF, or Fascists) had taken its toll, to say nothing of the war itself. In the two short years of intense fighting that began with the arrival of the Allied forces in the summer of 1943, Italy's material infrastructure endured severe blows. All told, Italy lost approximately one-third of its national wealth during the Second World War. Physical destruction was heaviest in the housing, transportation, and industrial sectors. One-quarter of all the railway lines were destroyed. Fully 90 per cent of all Italian port facilities were destroyed or damaged. The country's merchant marine was virtually wiped out. Ordinary Italians were most affected by heavy physical losses in the housing sector, by the acute shortage of basic foodstuffs, and by the precipitous drop in real incomes. At war's end the average real income was one-half that of 1938-9, a reduction in spending power that affected some 4.5 million industrial workers and at least three million others, both public servants and those in the private sector. That amounted to just under half (45 per cent) of the working population. In 1945 the average industrial worker took home 3,800 to 4,000 lire per month. The average white-collar worker took home between 4,500 and 4,700 lire per month, a level of income that accounted for more than one-half of all urban families. Of its income, a family of four could expect to spend at least 3,600 lire per month, or between 93 and 95 per cent, on foodstuffs alone. In the case of a working-class family, that left little more than 200 to 400 lire for all other expenses, including electricity, gas, and rent. Virtually nothing was left over to spend on anything else.4

26

From Fascism to Democracy

The Second World War left thousands of Italians homeless, and millions of Italians living in crowded, often unsanitary conditions. Thousands were compelled to find shelter in the flimsiest of metal shacks, even in caves.5 Agricultural production had slumped dramatically during the war. The first years of peace were especially desperate. In the months after the Liberation, millions of Italians came to know real hunger. About 80 per cent of families in southern Italy consumed no meat, sugar, or wine in their daily diets. In his article for Harper's magazine just before the 1948 election, the Italian-born journalist Nika Standen stated that even such basic food items as spaghetti were a 'major luxury' that very few Italians could afford. In fact, she concluded, most Italians were too poor to buy even oranges and so survived 'on watery soup and corn meal.'6 The mayor of Naples, one of Italy's poorest and most crowded cities at that time, estimated that in the early postwar period, each day some 80,000 Neopolitans awoke with no idea of what they were going to eat.7 It was a pathetic sight, really. And the children, more than anyone, told the sad tale of a country that struggled to cope with physical calamity, moral emptiness, and desperation. In Florence, erstwhile queen of the Renaissance, teenaged girls could be found mulling around hotels where Allied soldiers were stationed, bartering their bodies in return for food for their younger brothers and sisters. In the port city of Genoa, once-proud and powerful marine republic, children hovered around the cafe tables looking for cigarette butts which their parents could make into 'new' cigarettes and peddle on the streets for about fifty cents a package.8 In the larger cities of Rome and Milan, respectively the political and industrial capitals of the country, children attended school in shifts — if they were able to attend at all - because the school buildings had been damaged during the war or were in use as make-shift shelter for the homeless and refugees. Teachers were paid a pittance. Even worse, the lack of resources meant that teachers often found themselves teaching from school books published during the Fascist dictatorship. Even among young adults there reigned a kind of aimlessness and uncertainty, a sense of disorientation shared by their parents and teachers. 'Fine old universities like Pavia or Padua,' Nika Standen told American readers at the start of 1948, 'barely keep their doors open with professors and students alike undernourished.' When they did manage to remain open, these vestiges of Italy's great humanist heritage offered their students a bare minimum of instruction. The situation was so bad, Standen explained, that medical students at places like Rome and Milan

The Legacy of Fascism

27

were able to graduate without having had any clinical training whatsoever, the result of too few professors and too few laboratories.9 If there was one political party capable of successfully exploiting the daily sufferings of ordinary Italians, it was surely the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In fact, the PCI had been the political party most active in the clandestine fight against Fascism. It is estimated that at the height of its organizational strength in the years that it was outlawed, the PCI could count close to 8,000 adherents militating against Mussolini in Italy alone, to say nothing of the thousands more in exile abroad. The Allies knew that the communist Resistance fighters were among the most militant, as well as among the most ferocious, of the partisan fighters, a reputation that followed them after 1945. It was no surprise that the first instance of mass resistance to a fascist regime anywhere in Europe sprung from the communist-dominated factories of Turin and Milan, which witnessed a series of demonstrations, walk-outs, and work-to-rule campaigns in March and April of 1943.10 Indeed, the Turin and Milan strikes suggested that, even before Mussolini had been deposed, the PCI rank and file sat poised on the edge, not simply of revolt, but of revolution. From the Resistance fighters to the striking factory workers of the northern industrial centres, the PCI rank and file was eager to turn the struggle against Fascism into a broader war against the social, economic, and political system that had spawned Fascism in the first place and kept it in power for so long.'! No wonder that many in Allied circles watched nervously as the PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti returned to Italy at the end of March 1944, after some twenty years in exile in the USSR. What would Togliatti — who together with Antonio Gramsci had founded the PCI in 1921 - say to the throng of party faithful, armed and ready for the expected call to revolution? What Togliatti, in fact, said stunned just about everyone: the party and indeed the country, he announced, were at a critical svolta, a turning point.12 This declaration marked the famous svolta di Salerno, the PCI's new strategy of political cooperation and national reconstruction. The task at hand, Togiiatti continued, was to rid Italy of Fascism once and forever and to move quickly to the physical and political reconstruction of the country. Sweeping change to the existing system or radical experiments in new forms of societal and governmental organization would have to wait. In practical terms, that meant putting aside for the moment any talk of revolution. It meant the formation of a government of national unity in concert with the other antifascist parties that were emerging from exile and illegality to assume a central role in the Resistance. It

28

From Fascism to Democracy

meant collaborating with the military and with the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, the man who had brought Mussolini to power in the first place and then stood idly by when in 1926 the Duce outlawed all political opposition to Fascism.13 The Allies welcomed Togliatti's announcement, just as his party members condemned it. But keen observers like Ellery Stone and other Allied policy-makers, knew that the official pronouncements of the PCI leadership did little to alleviate in the short term the social and economic tensions that were fuelling a restive spirit at the grassroots level. One U.S. observer, Henry J. Morgenthau, put the problem well in June 1944 when he drew the connection between misery induced by the war and the growing popularity of the Italian Communist Party. 'The whole problem,' said Morgenthau, 'consists in the fact that we have been too idle in confronting the question of what we've been giving to eat to these folks.'14 Morgenthau's assessment was prescient indeed. Poverty, hunger, and economic devastation would come to dominate Allied thinking about Italy, the uncertain ally, for much of the early postwar period. Communism was indeed genuine alternative in Italy, and it would remain so as long as political instability and economic suffering were the rule. Italy was at a parting of the ways, and with Mussolini dead and buried, the struggle had begun over which direction the country would go. The Road to Liberation Popular expectations to the contrary, the removal of Mussolini from office on 25 July 1943 did not signal the end of the Second World War in Italy. Nor did it mean that Italy had automatically changed sides to join the Allied powers against Nazi Germany. That change came only with the signing of the armistice between the government of King Vittorio Emanuele III and the Allies on 8 September 1943. By that time the Germans had rescued Mussolini from his confinement and installed him as the nominal head of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a puppet regime to front the German occupation of important positions in northern Italy. The period between the fall of Mussolini on 25 July and the signing of the armistice, commonly referred to as the 'Forty-Five Days,' took an already uncertain Italian situation and made it even more confused. The historian Giuliano Procacci once referred to the period as 'one of those historic moments in which farce is mingled with tragedy.'15 Tragedy was the more pronounced. Although the war had been raging for more than three years, Italy had been spared the worst of its usual

The Legacy of Fascism

29

ravages. Yet, at the very moment that it seemed the war would end, with Mussolini gone, Italy became the theatre of daily heavy bombardments, massive physical destruction, and high civilian casualties. Farcical were the political machinations of the men in charge. After Mussolini's fall, the king was fully in command again. Technically speaking, by virtue of the Italian Constitution, the king had always been fully in command, with the constitutional authority to make or break prime ministers and cabinets. This is precisely what had happened in 1922 when Vittorio Emanuele III invited Mussolini and his Fascist party to assume the reins of power. So it was, too, some twenty years later, when the very same Vittorio Emanuele summoned Benito Mussolini to his office to tell the tired and aging Duce that the Fascist Grand Council had voted to get rid of him. The Duce was deposed not by a popular uprising or military defeat, but by a palace coup, led by an elderly and overly cautious monarch who twenty years earlier had felt impotent before the rising tide of the Fascist movement.16 With Mussolini gone from the prime minister's office, Vittorio Emanuele chose Marshal Pietro Badoglio to head the new government. Badoglio was from Piedmont, a career military man who earned his military reputation leading operations in the Ethiopian War. He resigned as chief of staff after the failure of the regime's exploits in Greece, thereby publicly breaking ranks with Mussolini and registering his dissatisfaction with the course of Mussolini's military plans.17 But Badoglio was not at all suited to govern, least of all a war-wearied, fractured, occupied Italy. He was a man of limited abilities under the best of circumstances. Above all, Badoglio was a military man, not a politician, faced with an exceptionally difficult situation that called for Churchillian-style statesmanship. Of course, the problems Badoglio faced were enormous. For one, he had to contend with a timid but constitutionally more powerful king who limited the prime minister's range of action. The antifascist parties, including the Christian Democrats, the PCI, the PSI, the Democrazia del Lavoro (DDL), the Partito d'Azione (PDA), and the Parti to Liberate Italiano (the six who would eventually form a coalition known as the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN) also limited Badoglio's freedom to govern. In contesting his leadership, these parties were guided by a deep distrust if not outright opposition to the monarchy and an establishment figure such as Badoglio for their role in keeping Mussolini in power and standing by while il Duce led an utterly unprepared Italy into the Second World War.18 The antifascist parties had a more elementary reason for opposing

30

From Fascism to Democracy

Badoglio. They wanted the king to move swiftly to break the alliance with Germany, join the Allies, and move immediately from the military regime to a political regime that for the duration of the war was to be comprised essentially of politicians (with a military head). But Vittorio Emanuele rejected this idea, and so Badoglio remained as head of the official Italian government. Nor would Italy yet surrender and join the Allies. The king's refusal to acquiesce to the demands of the antifascist parties was the impetus for the establishment of a formal coalition. On 13 August 1943 the CLN officially declared its opposition to the Badoglio regime.19 Although the king refused to be rid of Badoglio, the CLN did succeed in persuading the him to change his mind on one important question. At the start of September 1943, Vittorio Emanuele finally agreed to surrender and then join the Allies against Nazism-Fascism. When news of the armistice was made public on 8 September, the king and his family, with Badoglio and his cabinet in tow, fled from Rome under cover of darkness to escape the advancing German forces. They fled first to Pescara, on the Adriatic Sea, then onto the resort town of Brindisi, where they resumed the activities of the legally constituted Italian government, duly recognized as such by the Allied powers. More than merely a turning point in the war, the signing of the armistice was a defining moment in the history of contemporary Italy with far-reaching consequences hardly discernible at the time. The armistice put Italy into an ambiguous role in the fight against NazismFascism, introducing the notion that Italy was a 'co-belligerent' against Hitler and Mussolini. The term 'co-belligerent,' and thus not 'ally,' signalled a subtle but important distinction that reflected the Allied above all the British - intention to treat Italy as both friend and foe at the same time. (This concretized the British desire to 'make Italy pay' for its role in the war.20) Italy joined the Allied Powers with the uncomfortable status as both defeated enemy and welcome ally, as an occupied nation and a sovereign state at the same time. With the Germans at Rome's doors and the Allies halfway up the peninsula, Italy was, to borrow from Benedetto Croce, 'cut in half.'21 It was occupied by foreign armies from top to bottom and the theatre of a genuine civil war, with Italians loyal to Mussolini fighting the king's troops and the partisans fighting under the direction of the CLN. Thus, the situation after September 1943 was a far cry from the return to peace and normalcy that Italians had expected would follow the fall of Mussolini.

The Legacy of Fascism

31

After September 1943, however, Italy was divided in three, not two. The Royalist Badoglio government together with the Allied Command (at Caserta) were in charge of that area south of Rome and the Allied advance, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. In this part of the country, known as the Regno del Sud, or Kingdom of the South, armed Resistance against the Nazis and Fascists was an unknown phenomenon for the simple reason that German troops and Mussolini loyalists had been driven out of the area with the arrival of the Allies already in the summer of 1943. In the Kingdom of the South, the Badoglio government and the king were widely recognized as the legitimate governing authority, while such local CLNs as did exist in the south served an essentially administrative function. This was in stark contrast to the work of the CLNs in the north, where they led and organized the armed Resistance.22 A second Italy could be found in the centre of the peninsula, the area from and including Rome to Florence. After coming into German hands, the capital of Italy became the theatre of rather limited Resistance fighting. Rome was liberated by the Allies in June 1944. The presence of the Vatican in its centre probably spared Rome from a worse fate. In Florence, by contrast, fighting between the partisans and the Nazis and Fascists was fierce and in the open, in both the very heart of the city and the surrounding countryside. The situation in Florence in 1944 holds political significance. The CLNs there were relatively free to evolve and pursue their political goals. This was not much the case in other areas at the time. In the Allied-occupied south the CLNs were consigned to a largely bureaucratic role, while antifascists in the north spent most of their time actually fighting and thus had little opportunity to think about the kind of political order that would follow the defeat of the Nazis and Fascists. In Florence, and all of central Italy, the CLNs were able to devote much attention to preparing the groundwork for an eventual post-Fascist order, an order that presaged a decisive break with the forms of governmental organization that had obtained either before or during the period of dictatorship. Indeed, after the liberation of Florence in August 1944, the CLNs there became the de facto local government. This development would eventually be copied and spread to the north, but it remained virtually unheard of in the Kingdom of the South.23 The pattern of events in the Florence area mirrored closely the situation in the third Italy. The north was the scene of the most ferocious fighting of the Resistance. Indeed, the north was the real birthplace of the Italian armed Resistance. In this part of the country, the Resistance

32

From Fascism to Democracy

had a wider social base than in central Italy, albeit still limited in the proportion of active resisters to total population. Nevertheless, the breadth of the Resistance in the north carried great significance - its wide social base cut across class, attracting workers and peasants, the middle class, intellectuals, and artists. This, as Federico Chabod has noted, was an important precedent, insofar as it signalled the political awakening of sectors of the populace that for decades before and during Fascism had been inactive, apathetic, or systematically excluded from political participation.24 The Resistance carried tremendous political implications. It politicized and mobilized various strata of society, as well as building bridges between groups, like peasants and workers, that in the liberal era had been divided by mutual antipathy. True, the Resistance was a relatively limited phenomenon; it was limited geographically to the north, by and large, and limited also in terms of the number of active fighters it attracted. As H. Stuart Hughes aptly puts it, the Italian Resistance was 'the work of a minority - the work of a large minority, but still in no sense the achievement of the whole Italian people.'25 All the same, the Resistance did announce the arrival of what the socialist leader Pietro Nenni referred to as 'il vento del Nord,' the wind from the north, which was a reference to the expectation widespread among Resistance fighters that with the end of the war would come profound and lasting change in Italy's political, social, and economic order.26 It is well to remember those parts of Italy that knew nothing of the Resistance experience. After Mussolini, another wind blew in the south, a countervailing wind that was conservative and even reactionary.27 This counter-force was reflected in the institution of the monarchy, in the surviving remnants of the old Fascist hierarchy that to save themselves had helped oust Mussolini, in elements of the Italian military that remained loyal to the king and that were as conservative and reactionary as they had been when they threw the full weight of their influence behind the Fascist regime. The men who brought down Mussolini, it bears repeating, were far from antifascist in any meaningful sense of the word. The king, Badoglio and company were only antifascist insofar as that involved getting rid of Mussolini. But they understood full well that the vento del Nord was heading straight for them and their power bases, and they prepared to defend themselves when the time came to design the post-Fascist state of Italy. As the journalist Antonio Gambino perceptively notes, 'Among the men of the Quirinale (King's court) there [was] a design for the post-Mussolini era that is anything but democratic.'28 Any

The Legacy of Fascism

33

attempt by the antifascist parties to alter radically the face of Italian society would be squarely met by these conservative forces. The antifascist political parties were well aware and to some extent preoccupied by this fact. Their cooperation with the conservative caste represented by the king and Badoglio operated on the assumption that once the war was over, and all of Italy liberated, it would not be business as usual. There was to be no simple turning back to the old way of organizing society, to the liberal style of politics before Mussolini as the affair of a tight clique or political elite. Partisan blood had not been shed in vain. Italy would yet have its social reform, despite the obstinacy of the ruling class that had survived Fascism and was still resisting the impetus for change born of the Resistance and diffuse among large strata of the Italian population. The antifascist parties pinned their hopes on that one element that had so deluded them during the dark days of Mussolini's regime - namely, the Italian people, the mass of ordinary individuals, disinterested and disaffected, resigned, apathetic, and above all, apolitical. Indeed, the antifascist leadership widely shared the belief that Fascism had risen to power and survived so long precisely because of the political apathy of most Italians. Fascism may have ushered in an era of mass mobilization, resisters argued, but it had depended on the depoliticization of the Italian people. The chief objective of the Resistance, then, even after the Liberation, was to shake Italians out of their political stupor, to make clear to the mass of Italians that which resisters believed instinctively - political activity is a moral duty. On this question there was broad consensus among the varied parties of the Resistance.29 As one partisan pamphlet put it, 'The worker, the priest and the soldier' were united in their conviction that political involvement was a moral duty, and essential, if Italians hoped to avoid in the future the horrors visited upon Europe by fascism. In the same vein, one manifesto of the Action party declared, 'The time has come to recognize that politics is dirty only when it is left in the hands of shady, unscrupulous politicians, as in the days of the Fascist regime.'30 If there was anything truly revolutionary about the Italian Resistance, it was surely this: the notion that politics was not something dirty or irrelevant, something below the intellectual, or above the mass of illiterate or undereducated peasants or workers. Politics, the Resistance boldly pronounced, was no longer the preserve of a political class alone, but rather the business of every citizen regardless of profession. The Resistance in Italy was a moment of collective soul-searching. How and why did Fascism come to power? Why and how did it survive for so

34

From Fascism to Democracy

long? Who was to blame? Perhaps most importantly, how were the mistakes of the past to be avoided in the future? Few during the Resistance placed all the blame for Fascism on the Italian people as a whole. Fewer still were willing to dismiss Fascism as a mere blip, as the fault of one man only - Mussolini or, arguably, the king. Not even Benedetto Croce, so often cited as the father of the school of thought that sees Fascism as a 'parenthesis' in Italian history and disconnected somehow from the broader stream of contemporary Italian history, subscribed to the view that the Italian populace shared no responsibility whatever in the rise and longevity of Mussolini's regime. Croce wrote in December 1944, 'But [Mussolini], called to account for the damage and shame he wrought over Italy with his words and his actions and with his knack for abuse and corruption, might very well respond to the Italian people as that unlucky leader of the people of Florence ... responded to his friends in exile who criticized him for having led them into ... disaster ... "And you all, why did you listen to me?'"31 For Croce the Italian people themselves shared some of the blame for the tragedies that ultimately befell their country. Croce's parenthesis thesis must be understood in its proper context, which is his larger effort after 1943 to defend Italy's liberal era from the criticism of many of the would-be builders of the new Italy. Croce's theory was intended to preserve and transmit to the postwar period the best features of the old liberal democratic system, not to absolve the Italian people of their responsibility for Fascism.32 At the time, Croce's sentiment was echoed by virtually all of the major antifascist parties. No one seemed interested in propagating the myth of Italy as a 'nation of resisters,' as Charles de Gaulle was doing in France.33 If the long-term objective of the Resistance was to arouse the ordinary Italian, it was to be done by settling scores with the past, by coming to terms with the shortcomings of a purportedly democratic people who with hardly a murmur helped elect a dictator and either directly or indirectly helped keep that dictator in power for two decades. Had it not been for the ill-advised Italian participation in the Second World War, Mussolini's regime could very well have survived for decades longer. This point was not lost on Resistance leaders.34 Thus, there was the need not only to mobilize Italians but also to inculcate in them democratic values. From the pages of the official organ of the Young Christian Democrats came the harsh assessment that 'no truly civilized people would have tolerated Fascism for so long.' Italians ought not to comfort themselves in the misguided belief that they were the victims of one man and one regime. The time had come to

The Legacy of Fascism

35

acknowledge the complicity of the masses under Fascism and to confess 'out loud and without shame our own mea culpa.' The article concludes with a summons to prepare Italians intellectually for freedom. The antifascists' mission thus became to 'Educate! Educate! This is the real mission. Indeed, re-educate the thousands and thousands of young people led astray and bewildered.'35 Nowhere was the call for the political education of Italians more pronounced than among the Allies. The British, in particular, suspected that the Italians, however well intentioned, were not properly equipped to institute a democratic system and way of life. This distrust stemmed, in part, from seething British contempt towards the Italians for Mussolini's alliance with Hitler against the British in 1940.36 The alleged unpreparedness of Italians for democratic government was a convenient justification for the maintenance of strict British control in Italy until such time as the Italians learned, as Paul Ginsberg puts it, 'how to behave in a democratic fashion.'37 In August 1944, to justify the extension of British control of the peninsula the British Foreign Office issued a paper entitled 'The Future of Italy' which reads in part: The Italians have always been very cynical in their attitude towards their Government, not always without reason, and after twenty years of Fascism will, in all probability, be more so. The average Italian does not follow with any real interest what the Government are doing in relation to their advertised policy ... He does not, in any way, feel part of the Government as Englishmen do ... Italians of most classes are much more apt to seize on some political figure who touches their imagination, regardless of what party he belongs to and even what his ideas on the policy are, and follow him blindly. Thereafter, everything he says is acclaimed regardless of what he does. Unless, therefore Great Britain remains in control (i.e. a virtual dictator) and large-mindedly and firmly guides Italy along democratic lines, Democracy looks like having a very poor chance.38

A good British dictator, then, not self-government, would best serve to teach an apathetic, cynical, credulous Italian people how to 'behave' democratically. This was Whitehall's prescription for the future of Italian democracy after Fascism. There was more to the British stance than large-mindedness. British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden was open in his contempt for Italy and believed Britain's punitive impulses were motivated by a more elementary consideration: the desire to remove Italy from British interests in Greece and the Balkans. The British ex-

36

From Fascism to Democracy

pected Italy to lose all of its colonial possessions and even some national territory as punishment for its role in the Second World War - a fitting punishment, the British figured, for what had been, after all, an enemy power. y The British minister resident at Allied Forces Headquarters, Mediterranean Command, Harold Macmillan implored his government to change its attitude. 'There seems to be a kind of childish animosity towards the Italians,' Macmillan wrote in April 1945. 'Can [we] not exorcise this spirit from Whitehall?'40 U.S. policy-makers were inclined to see this punitive streak as not merely childish, but potentially damaging to the prospects of democracy in Italy. The United States saw Italy as a genuine ally rather than a defeated enemy. Where the United States made plans after the war to 'reform' the national 'character' of the defeated Germans and Japanese, no such reform was deemed necessary for the Italians. Almost to a man, U.S. policy-makers distinguished between the Italian people and the Fascist regime. There was a complex set of reasons behind this more generous American assessment of the democratic potential of the Italian people: this included the influence of the large and prominent Italian American community in the United States - as well as the influence in Washington of high-profile antifascist exiles like the historian Gaetano Salvemini and Mussolini's former Foreign Affairs Minister Carlo Sforza, who fled to the United States in opposition to Mussolini's regime in July 1940. Sforza, in particular, was crucial in convincing U.S. policy-makers that Italians were at heart a democratic, peace-loving people and that the terms 'Fascist' and 'Italian' were not synonymous. These high-profile antifascist exiles and the Italian American community - including celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and Joe Di Maggio - masterfully sold the line that Fascism represented a betrayal of the 'real' Italy and Italy's traditional alliances and orientation.41 The magnanimity of the United States vis-a-vis the Italians also reflected the chief objective of U.S. policy towards Italy, and that was to ensure the quick and easy transition from dictatorship to stable democratic government. Such a quick transition would, in turn, permit the quick withdrawal of American troops and also abate the hunger of U.S. investors eager to participate in the reconstruction of Italy. Punishing Italy for its role in the Second World War, American policy-makers believed, stood in the way of the transition to democratic government.42 U.S. officials clung to the belief that the promotion of cultural and economic ties between the United States and Italy would infuse the latter with the democratic spirit and provide a concrete model of durable