by Philipp Blom
In 1920, Schirru decided to emigrate to the United States, as his father had done before him. He arrived in New York in November, immediately sought contact with other Italian anarchists and socialists, and began writing for various magazines and newspapers. During the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1926 he was one of those working to save them from the electric chair, in vain. But Italy was still on his mind, and the rise of the Fascists troubled him deeply. So in 1930 he decided to return and to act. After traveling through France, Belgium, and possibly Great Britain he arrived in Milan in January 1931 and then went to Rome, where he took a room at the Hotel Royal, close to the Trevi railway station. In his luggage were two bombs and a revolver.
Faced with Mussolini’s inexorable rise and his iron grip on power, Schirru had decided that the only way to fight the dictatorship was to decapitate it. He was determined to kill the duce and was waiting for his chance. But his chance would not come. On February 3 he was arrested in his hotel room, probably betrayed by an informer. Among his possessions was a political testament he had written one month earlier and in which he announced:
For fascism as well as for all dictatorships and tyrannies, I have always felt nothing but deep-rooted horror. Mussolini, delighting in cynical brutalities and atrocious persecutions . . . I have always considered a reptile most dangerous to humanity. In his Neronian attitudes, the role of hangman for the Italian people and their liberty, in which he prides, have always inspired hatred in me—hatred and revulsion, not so much for the man who is little over half a quintal of flaccid and damaged flesh, as for the despot, the murderer of my comrades, the betrayer of those poor workers who, up to a few years ago, had nourished him. Years of meditation have only accumulated and compressed this hatred into my heart: the day must come when it will explode.2
At his arrest, Schirru obviously knew what fate was awaiting him and was determined not to submit to it. Taken to the Trevi police post, he suddenly pulled out his revolver, shot at the officers around him, and then tried to kill himself, but only succeeded in wounding and disfiguring himself. For the next two months, while awaiting trial, he recovered from his injuries and frantically tried to establish contact with his family, but his letters were never answered and very possibly never delivered.
Schirru was tried by a special Fascist tribunal on May 28 under a new law. There was no jury and only the most perfunctory defense before the leader of the tribunal, a young Fascist activist, pronounced the sentence: the accused was to be shot in the back by a firing squad, which at Mussolini’s insistence was to be composed of Sardinian volunteers. At two-thirty the next morning Schirru was awakened in his cell; he refused to see a priest before he was bundled off to the place of execution, where the sentence was carried out. He was thirty years old.
Hopes Disappointed
LIKE SO MANY OTHER IDEALISTS and poor migrants in search of a better life, Schirru had crossed an ocean only to find that there were deprivation and injustice in the New World as well as at home. In Depression-era America this lesson was especially severe, and fraught with irony. If Schirru had access to newspapers in his prison cell, he may have read about the opening of the Empire State Building in New York, conceived as a visible testimony to the success of investor John Jakob Raskob, who had made most of his fortune from General Motors, a beneficiary of the automotive boom during the early decades of the century.
Four thousand workers had populated the building’s construction site, including dozens of Mohawk Indians who were seemingly immune to feelings of vertigo as they negotiated scaffolding and beams hundreds of feet above the ground without anything to ensure their safety in the case of a fall. According to official statistics, five construction workers did fall to their deaths, one of whom had jumped after hearing that he had been fired.
Designed by William F. Lamb, the structure was to be the tallest in the world, overtaking the previous record holder, the Chrysler Building, which had held the title only for a matter of months. Towering above Manhattan, the new skyscraper was a steel-and-brick hymn to capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit: 1,454 feet high, built of ten million bricks, and offering stunning views of New York from more than six thousand windows on 102 floors. However, when it opened on May 1, 1931 (International Labor Day), only a little over a year since construction had begun, the shining symbol had lost much of its luster, as dozens of floors of office space stood empty.
Down in the streets, in the mighty shadows of the Colossus, were the new emblems of America: bread lines. Despite the fact that President Hoover was still convinced that unemployment was “shamefully exaggerated” and that “many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples,” the situation was in fact so desperate that even Al Capone opened a soup kitchen in Chicago.3 Of the country’s ten million unemployed, only a quarter were getting financial assistance from the state, while the rest was simply left to their own devices. Together with their families, they amounted to thirty million people—a quarter of the working population, who were desperately struggling to subsist without an income. Hundreds of thousands of them took to the roads or rails, hitching rides in cars or on freight trains in search of work or at least something to eat, and bands of desperate youths were roaming the countryside. Half a million people abandoned the big cities and went to rural areas in search of work, and for the first time in American history there were more people leaving the country than were entering it.
As banks folded, businesses failed, industrial output slumped, and millions were scrounging for a little bread or a few potatoes, agricultural prices collapsed due to bumper harvests abroad. Imported grain was so cheap that in many areas harvesting the fields was more expensive than simply letting the crop rot on the plant: wheat, cotton, apples, and peaches were worth less than the meager hourly pay of the laborers usually hired to bring them in, and in Kansas farmers took to burning grain and corncobs to keep warm as a cheap alternative to coal, while ranchers killed thousands of heads of cattle because they could not afford to feed them. As the suicide rate went up and the birth rate went down, a hundred thousand people applied to work and live in the Soviet Union, and many were openly talking about revolution.
Prior to 1924, Italy had been one of the main sources for immigration into the United States. In particular, the south of the country was at times desperately poor, and millions of Italians were struggling to feed themselves from one day to the next. Extreme poverty combined with high numbers of children led to situations of Dickensian cruelty, none more so than the carusi, children working in sulfur mines in Sicily. In 1910, the African American activist Booker T. Washington had visited these mines, which he described as “the nearest thing to hell that I expect to see in this life,” adding, “The cruelties to which the child slaves of Sicily have been subjected are as bad as anything reported of the cruelties of Negro slavery.”4
Indeed, the work was slavery. To all intents and purposes the children were sold by their desperately poor parents to the owners of the mines, as Washington reported: “The father who turns his child over to a miner receives in return a sum of money in the form of a loan. The sum usually amounts to from eight to thirty dollars, according to the age of the boy, his strength and general usefulness. With the payment of this sum the child is turned over absolutely to his master. . . . [N]either the parents nor the child will ever have sufficient money to repay the original loan.”5
Completely unmechanized, as they had been in antiquity, the mines were accessible only by steps hewn into the rock, as many as a thousand in the deepest mines, and the mineshafts themselves, unventilated and often hardly big enough for one man, were filled with sulfurous fumes. The temperatures were so stiflingly hot that the miners were completely naked. “Children of six and seven years of age were employed at these crushing and terrible tasks,” Washington observed.
Little had changed after the war, and Sicily was only the poorest region in a generally poor country. Prior to the Depression, the work that earned $100 in
Britain, $73 in Germany, and a remarkable $190 in the United States would currently bring a worker $39 in Italy as a whole, though much less again in the south of the country. Faced with a total lack of prospects, four million Italians had chosen to emigrate to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Like Michele Schirru, they had overwhelmingly gone to northern industrialized cities such as New York and Chicago, and they brought with them their social structures, their habits, and their food.
Many native-born Americans whose ancestors had come with earlier waves of emigration and who were mainly of Anglo-Saxon, German, or other northern European stock watched the arrival of large numbers of southern and eastern Europeans, many of them Jews, with great suspicion. The fight for Prohibition had partly been motivated by a culture war between rural communities of white Anglo-descended Protestants in the interior states and the growing urban populations with their very different attitudes toward alcohol and socializing. But the prohibitionists’ victory against the German fondness for beer, the Italian love of wine, and the universal popularity of spirits was only part of a much larger campaign to keep America eugenically pure, white, and Anglo-Saxon.
The First World War had eased the flow of European emigration, as many young men who otherwise would have gone to the New World went to the battlefields instead and died there, creating a shortage of labor, and of young men, after 1918. But this temporary reduction was not enough for American activists, who sought a permanent solution to the problem. Their tireless campaign resulted in the 1924 Immigration Act, which established immigration quotas, capping the number of immigrants from any given country at 2 percent of the number of people from that national group in the United States in 1890—before the bulk of new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe had made the journey across the Atlantic. By implicitly declaring this ethnic mix normative for the United States, it determined quotas for immigrants from northwestern Europe that were far higher than the actual demand, while excluding most of those who sought to immigrate from eastern and southern Europe—mainly Italians, Russians, and Jews, disproportionately many of whom still lived in former tsarist and Habsburg territories.
The measure proved effective, and its intention was every bit as racist as it appears. In 1924, US senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina said: “I think we now have sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship.” The very idea of America had become dangerously diluted, the senator claimed: “If you were to go abroad and someone were to meet you and say, ‘I met a typical American,’ what would flash into your mind as a typical American, the typical representative of that new Nation? Would it be the son of an Italian immigrant, the son of a German immigrant, the son of any of the breeds from the Orient, the son of the denizens of Africa? . . . Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”6
Even more than the Immigration Act, the Great Depression had slowed down the stream of Italian immigrants, and at times even reversed it. Michele Schirru was only one of tens of thousands of recent arrivals who found the situation in Depression-era America so hopeless and so hostile that they preferred to take their chances at home. It was not a good time for such a homecoming. After 1929, Italy’s industrial output had fallen by a quarter, as had wages; the army of the unemployed had tripled; and many people had to battle daily to stave off starvation.
A New Greatness
BUT WHILE THE ECONOMIC SITUATION WAS DIRE, a larger, messianic narrative of hope and national greatness was unfolding. Mussolini and his Fascist Party looked at Italy as little more than the clay out of which a great future nation was to be formed. Their model was clear: like the futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, they wanted nothing less than to restore the grandeur of the Roman Empire, a proud, warlike, powerful country celebrating virility and violence. Contemporary Italians, Il Duce believed, were too soft, too craven, and too cowardly to be capable of creating a great civilization.
To build a new and greater Italy, Il Duce would have to build a new and greater Italian people first. Having come to power in 1922, Mussolini had attacked his great project with unflagging energy and relentless grandiloquence. The conservative German historian Oswald Spengler had called for a Caesar to stem the tide of European decadence and restore the greatness of the West. While he despised Hitler, whom he regarded as a proletarian upstart, Spengler believed the world had found such a man of destiny in Mussolini.
Spengler had described population growth as Italy’s only weapon in the competition with other major powers, and the Fascists wholeheartedly agreed with him. Future wars would require future soldiers, and so the government passed a series of laws designed to encourage population growth: support for unwed mothers, taxes on bachelors, special subsidies and medals for families with many children, and tight controls on the sale of contraceptives. A 1931 law made it a “crime against the integrity in the health of the race” to encourage or use birth control and made abortion punishable by lengthy prison sentences (and, later, even the death penalty).
Artists among themselves: Hitler and Mussolini at an exhibition of classical art, 1938.
Il Duce himself apparently made a solid contribution to the cause. An epic womanizer who thrived on casual encounters even while in office and who liked to brag that he would bed up to four playmates a day while discharging the affairs of state virtually as an afterthought, Mussolini had an almost carnal feel for politics and for the mood of the crowd. In his speeches he was both leader and lover, Il Duce and Don Juan, as one of his mistresses related: “The shouting becomes frenetic, the roar grows like an explosion, rising with the crash to a frenzy. . . . Hats in the air, handkerchiefs, radiant laughing faces. . . . They seem mad. It is a delirium, something indescribable, an inexplicable feeling of joy, the . . . torment of the soul overflowing into the cry of jubilation.”7
Il Duce inspired intense devotion in his followers, as attested by the hundreds of letters arriving in his secretary’s office every day. Some of these notes were simple statements of admiration and loyalty, but many showed a degree of devotion that had distinctly religious and also erotic connotations; some even veered into sexual fantasies. One housewife from Bologna wrote 848 letters to her “great Lord and beautiful Duce” between 1937 and 1943, and may have been one of the many women to have had a furtive adventure with him at some point. Another woman confessed to her diary: “The duce makes me tremble with excitement, because I only need to hear his words to be transported in heart and soul into a world of joy and greatness.” A wounded veteran unburdened his soul, writing: “Attached to my bed is Your Effigy of when you were wounded and were on crutches, and I kiss Your Crutches—which I will soon have to use; I kissed them with passion, cause making myself equal to You in physical suffering, I will come to resemble You more in the ideal. For the blood given in Your name to the Fatherland; for the willing gift of my limb, Duce, I thank You!”8
Hoping to keep him safe for his historic mission, adoring men and women sent Mussolini amulets, holy pictures, and relics, and he was variously addressed as “the father of Italy,” “the father of the poor,” “the father of us all,” “the one who does all and can do everything,” “our God on earth,” “the one who was loved as a father,” and “the one who is venerated as the saints should be venerated.” The distinctly religious overtones of these appellations are not surprising in Catholic Italy, and Mussolini was a master at exploiting the culture of everyday piety and ritual existing in the country. Spontaneous gestures of generosity were a particular favorite, and would often be reported, repeated, and embellished like stories from the lives of the saints. Se lo sapesse il Duce (if only Il Duce knew) was a popular expression at the time.
The revered leader proved himself a genius when it came to creating an image of his heroic and even saintly person in the public mind. Threshing wheat bare-chested for the cameras, “he looked to me like a Christ on earth
,” as one awestruck peasant remembered, and wherever he appeared, the local Party organization managed without difficulty to gather a large and adoring crowd. There were pilgrimages to Mussolini’s birthplace organized by the National Association of Peasant Women, one of whose members reported in 1937: “Then, with religious emotion they visited the duce’s house, poor, rustic like their own, where mother has worked, loved, suffered, living a life like theirs, simple and loving, a life of sacrifice and happiness, teaching Her Great Son goodness, discipline and self-sacrifice.”9
The strong messianic Christian overtones of these sentiments were crucial to the success of the Fascist regime. Ever since blustering, bullying, and murdering his way to power, he had masterfully exploited his country’s collective psyche and preoccupations. In the fight against socialism, which during the 1920s had a very strong constituency among the working poor and the industrial laborers in the north of the country, his allies and financiers were landowners, factory owners, and urban middle-class people, concentrated in Milan and other manufacturing cities, where a socialist revolution appeared to be a real possibility. To gain a viable following, however, he needed to tap into a wider and more powerful kind of collective imagination.
Mussolini’s gestures toward reviving the glory of the Roman Empire created strong images, as did his advocacy of a plan to modernize and industrialize a country that was still largely rural and in which many people lived and thought much as they had done a century before. But in order to capture hearts and minds, he needed more than a rhetoric that was ultimately derived from the futurists and from his former mentor Gabriele d’Annunzio. Il Duce found this elusive ingredient in the strong presence of the church and its rituals, statues, and symbols in all areas of personal and public life.
