The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940

David F. Schmitz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865897, 9780807817667
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A comprehensive analysis of American foreign policy and Mussolini’s Italy. Schmitz argues that the U.S. desire for order, interest in Open Door trade, and concern about left-wing revolution led American policymakers to welcome Mussolini’s coming to power and to support fascism in Italy for most of the interwar period.

Originally published in 1988.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1 BETWEEN THE SCYLLA OF REACTION AND THE CHARYBDIS OF BOLSHEVISM: WOODROW WILSON AND ITALY

In 1922, Ray Stannard Baker provided the following outline of Woodrow Wilson’s policies at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. “Wilson meant to change the world,” Baker explained, “not by changing the system, as was the proposal in Russia and by radicals in western Europe, and so ‘shaking every foundation in order to dislodge an abuse,’ but by administering it uprightly according to traditional liberal principles of America and Great Britain.” This was to be accomplished by a “guarantee of a league of nations founded upon those principles.” In order to achieve his goal, Wilson had to fight two extremes at Paris, “militarism on the one hand and Bolshevism on the other.”¹

Although Wilson’s concern with Bolshevism and revolution has drawn the attention of most historians of the president’s policies at Versailles, Wilson’s work toward securing a liberal peace was not limited to combating revolution on the left, as his policies toward Italy demonstrate.² The president had led the United States into World War I in order to eliminate militarism, only to have that objective overtaken by revolution. But Wilson did not lose sight of the problem of autocratic governments and imperialism. As Baker pointed out, Wilson viewed the return of militarism, or the old order, to power in Europe as a problem as serious as Bolshevism, and one that could not be ignored if a liberal peace settlement was to be achieved. “If order based upon military force were to win out,” Baker noted, Wilson foresaw that “the same old problem of what to do with militarism would still confront the world.”³

The problem Wilson faced, therefore, was that while he worked to prevent the spread of Bolshevism, the old order could not be allowed to reestablish itself. It was in Italy that Woodrow Wilson directly confronted the dual challenge of war and revolution. And it was in Italy where the president decided to take his boldest stand in an effort to promote change within Europe and secure his personal vision of the peace. The central issue that concerned the president and came to divide him and his Italian counterpart, Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, was Italy’s territorial aspirations after the war, particularly for the port city Fiume (Rijeka) on the Adriatic. Wilson adamantly refused to grant the Italian claim. He believed that Orlando’s was a militaristic policy and would only serve to aid the reactionary forces within Italy. In view of the complexity of this problem and the various forces opposing Wilson at Paris, it is surprising that the president held to his peace program as strongly as he did. Promoting change to eliminate militarism on the one hand and to undercut revolution on the other would be a difficult task under any circumstances. Coming at the end of the First World War, with its unprecedented destruction and desires for revenge, the task was nearly impossible.

The problem was summarized in a memorandum that Secretary of State Robert Lansing asked the American counselor of embassy in the Soviet Union, DeWitt C. Poole, to prepare. In the paper, entitled “Concerning the Purposes of the Bolsheviki: Especially with Respect to a World Revolution,” Poole warned that “the vital problem at the moment is to lead the Government and the people” of both the United States and other non-Bolshevik governments “between the Scylla of reaction on the one hand and the Charybdis of Bolshevism on the other.”⁴ The problem Wilson faced in Italy was how to prevent the groups seeking change from following the example of the Soviet Union, without relying on the old, reactionary forces to maintain stability.

Nowhere after the war was the problem of revolution more acute than in Italy where radical trade unions and parties on the left kept the threat of social revolution very much alive. Italy was in a revolutionary crisis—a situation that continued until the failure of the workers’ factory occupations in the fall of 1920. And it was Italy that the State Department most feared would succumb to revolution and become the springboard for a new crisis in Western Europe.⁵

The Italian government had not entered World War I at the outset of hostilities: it had delayed choosing sides, waiting to see which alliance would provide it with more benefits. With the signing of the secret Treaty of London in 1915, the Allies promised Italy territory adjacent to the Adriatic in return for joining the war against Germany. A notable omission from the treaty, however, was Fiume. The treaty assigned it to the Serbs. This would raise serious problems in the future. The Italian declaration of war was immediately unpopular at home with its working class and Socialist party.⁶

The signing of the Armistice in 1918 did not solve the political problem of the antiwar Socialists. Indeed, the Italian government’s decision to join the war had given further evidence of its lack of concern for the workers and its unwillingness to address domestic problems. With the war now over, the trade unions and the Socialist party expected domestic changes and saw the government’s postwar imperialistic ambitions for territory in the Adriatic as an attempt to avoid their demands and use foreign policy to rally support for the old order. They continued to wage organized domestic opposition to their government’s desire for Fiume.

But the crisis in Italy was not simply one of the left versus a democratic government. The war, as noted earlier, had divided Italian society into two hostile camps. The left opposed the war; on the right, a strong ultranationalistic reactionary movement supported the war. Postwar Italy was splitting into two blocs while the government, attempting to hold an ever-weakening middle ground, sought the support of the right for stability. These “forces of order,” to use Arno Mayer’s term, were even more of a source of unrest and instability immediately after the war than the left.⁷

In their desire for domestic change and a nonimperialist peace settlement, the Italian labor movement expressed support for Wilson and his Fourteen Points. In turn, the president opposed the Italian government’s position on territorial gain from the war and reliance upon the ultranationalist and reactionary forces for power. Wilson viewed the domestic right, not the left, in Italy as the real threat to stability and peace. The president believed that the internal problems of Italy stemmed not from its failure to obtain Fiume, but from the Italian government’s intransigent position on needed domestic reforms. This was the problem Wilson hoped to overcome by his decision to forge an alliance of interests with the liberal and Social Democratic masses which were seeking nonrevolutionary change. The State Department, however, opposed the president’s analysis; it feared that the large and vocal Socialist opposition would line up with Lenin’s peace proposals and revolution.

It was in this volatile political situation that Wilson decided directly to intervene in an effort to bolster the liberal-left “forces of movement” within Italy. Wilson chose Italy as the place where he would attempt to carry out his strategy of constructing a liberal-capitalist center position to insure peace and capitalist economic viability. Wilson never believed that supporting a reactionary position in Italy to prevent instability was a long-term solution to Italian political problems or peace in Europe.

During World War I, the Wilson administration had two main, closely interrelated objectives in dealing with Italy which were consistent with its overall European policy: to gain Italian support for Wilson’s New Diplomacy and postwar plans, and to create the proper contacts that would allow Americans to enjoy better economic relations with Italy. Obtaining the first objective would insure the second, and more trade was seen as a force for liberalization and influence in Italy.

The American ambassador to Rome, Thomas Nelson Page, expressed the second objective upon the U.S. entrance into the war. Page wrote Secretary of State Robert Lansing to urge that “a loan may be made to Italy of as large an amount as may seem feasible.” Although Italy’s desperate need for capital to purchase war equipment was noted, it was by no means the only, or even the primary, reason for Page’s urgent request on behalf of the Italians. Page also requested that “ships may be furnished for the transport of American coal, grain and other products, of which Italy stands at the present in real need. I feel that if this be done we shall be able hereafter to obtain our fair share of the commerce of Italy instead of, as hitherto, being almost excluded therefrom.”⁸

That the war provided the United States valuable economic opportunities was a constant theme of Wilson’s Commerce Department from the beginning of the hostilities in Europe. When the fighting began in 1914, the effects on the U.S. economy were immediate and dramatic. In 1915, the Commerce Department had reported that “in the two weeks immediately following the declaration of war in Europe our oversea commerce came practically to a standstill.” The effects of this halt in trade spread like a tidal wave. The stock exchange was forced to close, as were many other commodity exchanges in New York. Commercial failures were common, and business activity was paralyzed for the first few days as people waited to see what would happen next.⁹

As the department’s annual report pointed out, these events had an important message for anybody in Washington who was willing to listen. “These things occurred to us,” the report emphasized, “thousands of miles across the seas from the field of active hostilities. They happened to us, a nation which has prided itself on its economic independence. They have demonstrated our economic dependence, or rather the closeness of our economic relationship with Europe and our vital interest in foreign trade and international commerce.” The department’s Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce believed that the outbreak of war offered the United States a great opportunity to gain the competitive edge on the Europeans before a peace settlement.¹⁰

Businessmen and private firms were not far behind their government counterparts in seeing the opportunity that the war presented for expanding trade, particularly in previously closed areas. In 1915 the American section of the International Chamber of Commerce in Italy wrote the Commerce Department requesting the appointment of a commercial attaché for Italy. “He will find here,” the Chamber of Commerce wrote, “a splendid field, as there was never a better opportunity than the present for America to get and to hold its share of the business in Italy.” The war had cut off Italy’s former main suppliers of goods, Germany and Austria, as well as her outlets for trade. The chamber depicted Italy as “a great and growing country,” where American trade could easily be multiplied many times over.¹¹

In New York, the business community was alive to the new opportunities that the war presented. Leading businessmen and financiers, headed by J. P. Morgan’s Thomas W. Lamont, formed the Italy America Society to help promote better relations with Italy.¹² The Guaranty Trust Company conducted a series of studies on the economic conditions in European countries. The study on Italy emphasized that the war had disrupted old trade ties with Germany and Austria and that Rome’s postwar trade policies would “deserve the closest attention of American businessmen,” particularly in the areas of coal, lumber, machinery and railroads. Italy would be inviting Americans “to extend and enrich” their trade there because “modern methods [have] seized the [Italian] industrial mind and extensions of plant, intensive development of resources and quantity production are to be continued as peace policies.”¹³

The second American concern, support for President Wilson’s New Diplomacy, ran into a two-sided problem that, temporarily at least, sidetracked business efforts to further exploit the Italian market. During the war the Wilson administration had come to the conclusion that Italy was not a first-rate power. The Italian government was considered weak and indecisive. The Italians’ poor military showing during the war, their constant plea for more aid and support through Ambassador Page, and their need for the most basic of materials, such as coal and wheat, to continue fighting, served as proof to American officials of their beliefs.¹⁴

At best, Italy was viewed as a developing nation both politically and economically. Such a situation had benefits and drawbacks for the United States. The State Department hoped that the Italians, because of their great economic needs, would see supporting Wilson’s program for peace as having the greatest potential benefits for their future. On the other hand, policymakers feared that Italy was particularly vulnerable to unrest or revolution. The State Department and Colonel Edward M. House’s Inquiry, a group of advisors, economists, geographers, and others who investigated and planned for the problems that Wilson would confront during negotiations, were particularly concerned with the danger of Italy’s weak political system and revolution. The Inquiry noted as early as December 1917 that “in regard to Italy . . . there is the obvious danger of social révolution and disorganization.”¹⁵ In a more condescending tone, Gordon Auchincloss of the State Department (House’s son-in-law), noted in his wartime diary that “if we are not careful we will have a second Russia on our hands.” “The Italians are like children. They must be lead [sic] and assisted more than almost any other nation.”¹⁶

In addition, Italian-American relations were strained during the war by the Italian government’s opposition to Wilson’s peace plan. The conflict centered on the desire for territorial gain from the war and opposition to Point Nine of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which stated: “A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognized lines of nationality.” This position brought Wilson’s policy of self-determination for the new states of Eastern Europe directly into opposition with a victorious Italy seeking territorial gain from the war. Italy had informed the United States that it did not accept this position as a basis for peace and that it would continue to demand territory after the war.

Wilson immediately rejected the Italian protest to his plans. Moreover, the president identified the Italian government as early as January 1918, and its reliance upon the forces of order in Italy, as a potential difficulty in Europe that he might have to overcome. Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote Wilson in January 1918 about the Italian government’s “dissatisfaction” with Wilson’s statement on Italy in his Fourteen Points address.¹⁷ At this time Lansing supported the Italian position that a settlement of Italy’s boundaries along the lines of nationality would not secure Italy’s defense against Austria-Hungary. “I think that this is the ground for Italian dissatisfaction, and it is not entirely without justification,” Lansing wrote. The secretary feared that if Italians gained the impression that their nation would not “strengthen her position in the Adriatic, the Italian people will become discouraged,” feel there was no reason to continue fighting, and look to making a separate peace. “With the present political situation in Italy and the depression following their military reverses such an impression would be most unfortunate and might be disastrous.” Lansing wanted the president at least to send some assurances to the Italians that they were not being abandoned. Not to do so would only strengthen the antiwar Socialists within Italy.¹⁸

Unmoved by Lansing’s arguments, Wilson made no effort to mollify Italian anxieties or to open up discussions about the peace. Wilson insisted in his reply to his secretary of state that he could not pledge the United States to fight for Italian control over the Adriatic. Furthermore, Wilson added, “There is nothing in what I have omitted to say to alarm the Italian people, and it ought to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Halftitle Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Between the Scylla of Reaction and the Charybdis of Bolshevism: Woodrow Wilson and Italy
• Chapter 2 A fine Young The Fascist March Revolution on Rome
• Chapter 3 Establishing Normalcy The United States and Mussolini, 1922-1925
• Chapter 4 Fixing The Pendulum Italian War Debts and Foreign Policy
• Chapter 5 A House in Order Italy and The Great Depression
• Chapter 6 That Admirable Italian Gentleman: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Italy, 1933-1935
• Chapter 7 The Most Hair Trigger Times Ethiopia and The Origins of Appeasement
• Chapter 8 The Surest Route to Peace Economic Appeasement 1936-1938
• Chapter 9 Splitting The Axis Policy Toward Italy, 1938-1940
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index