Benito Mussolini – Old Magazine Articles

Mussolini’s Popularity

In this article, famed journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick went to great lengths to explain why the Italian people were so […]

His Popularity
(NY Times Book Review, 1923)

In the attached article, famed journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick (1880 – 1954) went to great lengths to explain why the Italian people were so coocoo crazy for the rule of Benito Mussolini. At this point he had only been in power for eight months:

“Mussolini has the people hypnotized, but he has been given so much rope that he is sure to hang himself in the end.”

Fascist Thought in Italian Literature
(NY Times, 1923)

“Fascism, which began in Italy as a political and social force, soon became cultural as well. Already the movement has produced a considerable literature of its own. It is a literature of thews and sinews, of conflict and aspiration: its appeal is to a people awakened to a new consciousness of the possibilities and responsibilities of a life, a people that is confident that it has recovered the elixir of youth and has faith in the future.”

”We Must Be Strong”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1936)

Knowing his audience well, Il Duce served it up good and raw in this 1936 speech:

“We must be strong. We must be always stronger. We must be so strong that we can face any eventualities.“

Mussolini Betrayed the Italian Jews
(Liberty Magazine, 1939)

“What is the reason for Il Duce’s newly acquired antisemitism? Why the new laws degrading the Jews of Italy? There are hardly 60,000 native-born Jews in all Italy. Many Italians have never laid eyes on a Jew. Antisemitism played no part in Italian life until Il Duce determined to banish the Jews into a moral and material ghetto.”

Mussolini Betrayed Italian Labor
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

After Hitler drafted everyone who could possibly be drafted, he found that he now had a labor shortage. He reached out to his fellow Fascist, Mussolini, asking for additional workers – Italy complied and numerous volunteers went forth. These Italians returned two years later and told how they were consistently abused:

“They were treated by the master race like the millions of Russian, Polish, French, Yugoslav war prisoners who are forced to produce for the Nazi war machine. Far from home, cut off from their families, the Italian workers suffered hardships often as great as the workers from Nazi-occupied countries.”

‘I Am Not a Dictator”
(Liberty Magazine, 1938)

In 1938, Fulton Oursler (1893 – 1952), editor of Liberty, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in order to ask Benito Mussolini why he invaded Ethiopia and to get his thoughts as to whether there would be peace in Europe. We can’t say that Il Duce gave very thorough answers to those questions, but Oursler did find out what was eating Mussolini:

Why is it that the people of the United States are so against Fascism? What is the matter with them? Why is the whole press so bitter against Fascism? Can you answer me that?

Massacre
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Late last week 30 prominent Ethiopians were tried as ringleaders in the attempted assassination [of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani]. They were to serve as public examples of Italy’s determination to rule over her new African domain. All other natives found in possession of arms were shot by Fascist firing squads, more than 1,000 terrified men being mowed down in a bloody Mussolini-ordered revenge.

He Died Badly
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

An Italian partisan fighter described to an American correspondent exactly how Benito Mussolini met his end.

Italy Condemned
(Literary Digest, 1935)

Any of us born after 1945 have seen this before: the United Nations condemns a dreadful dictator and sends him a mean email and the dictator deletes it (Sadam Hussein was condemned 17 times by the U.N.) – but this was the first time it happened in the Twenties. The League of Nations condemned Mussolini for the Ethiopia invasion, and Mussolini couldn’t have cared less.

The Passive Resistance of the Native Population
(Literary Digest, 1938)

Recently former Viceroy Graziani cabled Mussolini that ‘my surveys demonstrate that tranquility is absolute. The native population is with Italy.’ But a writer in the Tribuna of Rome admitted that ‘nobody must delude himself with the idea that the former Shoan-Galla ruling caste have resigned themselves to the loss of their privileges and have welcomed our Italian Empire.’

‘Ethiopia Smolders”
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Italy’s financial and human resources are being heavily drained, not only by a vast [Roman] road-building program in the conquered kingdom, but particularly by the efforts of 200,000 men who compose the fascist expeditionary force to pacify a warlike population of 9,000,000 natives in a territory larger than France and Italy combined.

‘War Fears in Italo-Ethiopia Rift”
(Literary Digest, 1935)

A report on the start of the Italian adventures in Ethiopia:

The dispute arose over alleged trespasses by Ethiopians on Italian possessions in Eritria and Italian Somaliland, in East Africa.

A solemn declaration of Abyssinia’s peaceful intentions toward Italy was read in broken but emphatic Italian to representatives of the foreign press in Rome by the nervous and impassioned Negradsa Yesus, Abyssinian Charge d’ Affaires. In fervent tones he asserted that Abyssinia’s intentions were so peaceful ‘that if Italy remained without a single soldier and without a single gun in her colonies, Abyssinia would not touch a single stone.’

Mussolini explained why he invaded Ethiopia in this article…

The Italian Conquest of Ethiopia
(Literary Digest, 1937)

A column about Mussolini’s Minister of Colonies, Emilio De Bono (1866 – 1944) and his popular book, La Preparazione E Le Prime Operazioni:

Last week, with the appearance of a third printing, following a sold-out second edition (both of which were marked for publication in 1937), Italians at home and abroad noted certain deletions, including the passage which intimated that Mussolini had been on the point of abandoning his campaign in the face of British armed intervention.

The Black-Shirt Revolution
(The Nation, 1922)

A report by Carleton Beals on Italy’s new order:

The strong state has arrived in Italy. It has been on the road ever since the failure of the factory seizures in September, 1920.

The Fascisti
(Current Opinion, 1921)

A tight little essay that clarifies the force behind Italian fascism. This was an editorial penned by Dr. Frank Crane, a pastor who appeared regularly in the pages of CURRENT OPINION.

The Fascisti is a name given to a political party in Italy. Political parties, and indeed almost all organizations, as has often been pointed out, hold together and get their strength by hating something. The Fascisti hate the Bolshevists, Communists and the like.

Click here to read about those who resisted Mussolini.

Fascism At It’s Peak
(Time Magazine, 1923)

A dictatorship can last forever, if properly managed. It is my task to provide a mechanism that will endure and to have the various parts of this mechanism running without friction; then after I am gone it will be able to run itself. A dictatorship must answer the purpose for which it was introduced. Certainly the Fascist regime will last a very long time… Socialism works on the principle that all are equal, but Fascism knows we are far from equal. Take the great masses of human beings. They like rule by the few.

Fascism’s Triumph Explained by Italian-American Journalists
(Literary Digest, 1922)

At the request of The Literary Digest editors, a number of Italian-language journalists working in North America were asked to explain the great success that the Italian Fascists were experiencing in 1922 Italy. This article lists an enormous number of Italian language newspapers that existed in the United States at that time; virtually every medium-sized to large American city had one. We were surprised to find that the most pro-Mussolini Italian-American newspaper operating in the U.S. was located in New York City.

In the late Thirties, early Forties the FBI began to monitor the Italian-Americans who adored Mussolini – Click here to read about it