The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism

"An age of hero worship is an age of instability," historian John P. Diggins (1972, 69) wrote of the tempestuous 1920s, when Americans' interest in Benito Mussolini grew from curiosity to fascination to outright idolization. Scholars of Italian American history may be familiar with Diggins's oft-cited study Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America and the dizzying assortment of personalities represented therein. The diversity of Fascism's supporters, which included capitalists, Catholics, nationalists, liberals, intellectuals, and "gut-thinkers" "reveals an array of antinomies that almost defies ideological analysis," wrote Diggins (1972, xvii; 1966, 488). His best attempt at such an analysis was to argue that early Fascism's amorphous nature allowed Americans to make of it what they wanted, and as such, they did not really have a conscious ideology of the movement, only a reflection of their own "psychic needs" (1972, 69).The idea that Americans admired Mussolini because they misunderstood Fascism's tenets does not sit well with Katy Hull, who wrote The Machine Has a Soul largely in response to Diggins and the scholars in his wake who incorrectly claimed that only liberals fell for Mussolini's charms. In fact, many Americans from across the political spectrum saw promise in early Fascism, and the question of how a foreign dictator could win over so many Americans is one that has demanded an answer for decades. At long last, Hull offers a much-needed reply through her analysis of four influential Americans with public sympathies toward Fascism. Hull uses the liberal Catholic journalist Anne O'Hare McCormick, the conservative ambassador to Italy Richard Washburn Child, the Italian American businessman and newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, and the political philosopher Herbert Schneider to represent both the diversity and commonality of Mussolini's admirers.Like Diggins, Hull argues that each sympathizer's response to Fascism tells us more about their feelings toward the US than about their thoughts on Mussolini or Italy. But she offers a significant scholarly contribution to Fascist studies by identifying the ideology that underpinned their pro-Fascism. Hull argues that each "saw fascism as a means of harnessing the benefits of modernity, while resisting its anesthetizing effects" (18). They viewed modernization and the mass production and consumption that accompanied it as dehumanizing, spiritless, and effeminate. While they did not want to turn their backs entirely on modernity, they believed Fascist Italy offered the possibility of having simultaneously "the energy, efficiency, and high-sheen glamour that they associated with machines; and the feelings of fulfillment, connectivity, and peace that felt so elusive in the modern age" (151). Hull's sympathizers used Fascism as an example to show their readers how America was going wrong and to suggest a pathway toward setting it right.Organized chronologically, Hull's account relates the story of Mussolini's rise and fall in America through the eyes of her four subjects, drawing together each author's public writings in conjunction with their private correspondence and those of their colleagues in the press and counterparts in the Italian and American governments. Her first chapter examines Child's, McCormick's, and Schneider's writings on the origins of Fascism. Hull finds all three disenchanted with modernity and excited by the spirit, violence, and patriotism of Fascist youth who seemed to wake Italy from its sleepy decay. In her second chapter, she replaces Schneider with Pope to demonstrate how the three media professionals sold Mussolini's old-fashioned manliness as a "panacea, foil, and model" for Americans who were supposedly losing themselves to pleasure and consumption (63). Chapters 3 and 4 extend her arguments by closely examining the metaphor of the machine in Italy and the United States during the Great Depression and New Deal, while chapter 5 critiques the trope of the garden that served Italy in its failed quest to "cultivate" Ethiopia. In her conclusion, Hull traces each sympathizer's break with Fascism: While Child died in 1935 and Schneider simply stopped researching Fascism, McCormick and Pope held on for longer than most sympathizers, unwilling either to acknowledge the movement's antisemitic turn or admit their error. While McCormick eventually came close to admitting her failings, Pope's newspapers printed audacious lies about his prior support of Mussolini's regime.By including the Italian-born Pope with Schneider, McCormick, and Child, Hull gives strength to her argument that the ideological commonalities that united the sympathizers were more important than their differences. This is a significant choice: Pope, the ethnic newspaper publisher (Il Progresso Italo-Americano), is rarely considered along with American intellectuals of his era, likely because he predominantly wrote editorials in Italian. Hull's inclusion of Pope bridges an unnecessary divide in scholarship and raises new questions about how Pope, and Italian Americans like him, understood themselves and their relation to Fascism. Was he "American," as Hull describes him, and primarily interested in the economic and spiritual recovery of the United States following World War I? Or was he Italian American, as ethnic scholars view him, and interested mostly in Fascism's benefits to the ethnic community he led, one that had suffered considerable humiliation at the hands of Congress and the courts in the 1920s (Diggins 1972, 78; Cannistraro 2005, 78)?Because Hull's choice diverges from traditional Italian American scholarship, it deserves a closer look. Though he was a naturalized US citizen, Pope's power rested on his leadership of the Italian immigrant community, a position he cemented through control of the Italian-language press. Pope used his pulpit to convince his famously apathetic and disorganized community that Fascism would raise their racial profile in America and heighten Italy's prestige on the international stage (Luconi and Tintori 2004, 23; Cannistraro 2005, 78). Pope expertly nurtured and then capitalized on the promise of italianità, or Italian cultural and racial pride, to unite and then politically mobilize his community, thereby earning even more political capital for himself (Cannistraro 1985, 283). His unparalleled political success made him atypical of migrant editors, as Stefano Luconi (1999) points out, and Hull's book offers an intriguing alternative reading of him as an American intellectual. But he was not only an American. Pope and his Italian readers had an inherently different interest in Fascism than McCormick's readers of the New York Times and a different reason for wanting to see Mussolini succeed. Hull's analysis might have been strengthened by engaging with Pope's Italian identity too.Questions about motivation extend to all four sympathizers: To what extent did they believe the lies they reported about Fascism, and what does that tell us about their aims? At first, Hull characterizes her sympathizers as true believers who were taken in by Mussolini's "smoke and mirrors" (45). Later she notes times when they increasingly "misrepresented" (75) or "exaggerated" the truth to present a "monstrously warped version of reality" (82). By the time Italy invaded Ethiopia, she writes, "it was all fiction" (139). To portray Fascism as a machine with a soul, all four sympathizers had to overlook, mischaracterize, and deny some obvious truths about Italy. But if these authors were aware that they reproduced propaganda and "make believe," how could they also have wanted America to learn anything from Fascism (93)? Could they really have believed that their own lies represented the cure for a disastrous American condition? Child, McCormick, Schneider, and especially Pope earned money and power in exchange for their writing on Fascism, and it seems just as possible that they wrote what they believed Americans wanted to read, not what they believed Americans needed to know. These essential questions about truth, complicity, and political ideology broaden Hull's intervention well beyond the field of Italian American history.Reading the four sympathizers' manipulations of the truth, their fears about democracy, and their complaints about modernity in the postwar US conjures up continual parallels to the twenty-first century that should captivate any reader. Their cynical take on technology is especially relevant today, as it is almost impossible not to replace the word machine—which they panned as both a means of escape and an existential threat to labor—with today's smartphone, social media, or ChatGPT. The book's insights into Americans' attitudes toward their future, its concise history of Mussolini's popularity in America, and its unsparing critique of the myths of Fascist propaganda make it an important and timely contribution to both scholarship on Fascism and to broader investigations of American political, intellectual, and ethnic history.