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Morale in Fascist Italy in Wartime Author(s): Saville R. Davis Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Nov., 1941), pp. 434-438Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2769292Accessed: 04-05-2015 13:44 UTC

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MORALE IN FASCIST ITALY IN WARTIME

SAVILLE R. DAVIS

ABSTRACT Fascist propaganda was not successful on the home front. The outcome of Italian

military ventures in Albania and in Libya was a logical consequence. While allowed to circulate, Swiss and Vatican newspapers were extremely popular while Italian papers were accepted with contemptuous amusement. By means of the foreign press, short- wave radio, and the grapevine the Italian people have kept surprisingly well informed. It appears that the Italians would rather lose to the British than to the Germans.

For eighteen years Mussolini projected into the consciousness of the Italian people his slogan, "Believe, Obey, Fight." He employed every device of modern propaganda technique. He confidently ex- pected a high state of civilian morale on the day when fascism should meet its supreme test in another world war.

He was deceived. When the Italian conscripts went into action in Albania and in Libya, their belief was flagging; their obedience was mechanical. They had no heart to fight.

The months since Italy entered the war, then, present a remark- able case study in national morale. To those of us on the scene, it was apparent that the Italian people won the battle of domestic propaganda. They refused to become genuinely militarized for the sake of the Fascist party's gamble on quick German victory. They managed to resist all efforts to convert them into friends of Germany and of German national socialism.

Fascism, then, was defeated on the home front. What happened in Albania and in Libya followed as a logical consequence of the anti- war feeling back home. It is not possible to fight modern battles with an army of conscientious objectors.

I cannot cite any statistics, any Gallup polls, in support of these statements. At present writing only two accounts of the breakdown of fascist morale have been brought out of Italy under conditions which permitted free writing. And while the account in the Christian Science Monitor tallies with that of John T. Whitaker in the Chicago Daily News, historians must wait for the assembling of more diversi- fied source material.

Nevertheless, I believe it is fair to say that the qualified American 434



MORALE IN FASCIST ITALY IN WARTIME 435

reporters in Rome during the past year are in substantial agree- ment on the essential facts. As long as Mussolini kept war purely in the realm of oratory, as long even as he confined war to the smaller expeditions in Ethiopia and in Spain, the bulk of the Italian people continued to tolerate fascism as a domestic system. But when he tried in earnest to direct their allegiance toward Germany, discontent became general. When he declared war a great fear seized the whole people and they began to talk with astonishing fervor against the regime. When the balloon was punctured, and the people realized that the Fascist party's militarism was a hollow mockery, only the iron hold of the German Gestapo on the reins of power managed to save appearances for the Duce. Had it not been for the Germans, there was more than an even chance that Mussolini would have then been overthrown.

Throughout this period I lived in Rome, traveled regularly through central and northern Italy, and made an effort to talk to people of all classes. These, briefly, were my observations:

People of all classes laughed at the newspapers. "Give me my thirty centesimi of lies," said a workingwoman to the news vendor at a Roman kiosk. The fascist propagandists were sparing no lan- guage in their effusive courting of the Germans. News reports were but thinly veiled polemics. Virginio Gayda and Giovanni Ansaldo poured their scalding rhetoric down the columns of page one, often printing three or four thousand words in a single issue. And yet these prophets, so often quoted in the American press, were ignored in the most classical fashion at home. It should be recognized that Italians both understand and expect that their politics will be served up steaming. They accept it with a millennial patience; indeed, they know propaganda of old.

The attitude of the average Italian toward the press was one either of contempt or of indifference. Meanwhile Swiss newspapers were snapped up by all who could read French or German. And the Osservatore romano, organ of the Vatican, was the most popular newspaper in Italy until the fascist strong-arm squads drove it off the streets shortly before Italy entered the war and compelled a strict neutrality thereafter in its columns.

The radio was likewise given scanty attention in so far as it spread propaganda. It carried the usual line of talks, German hookups,



436 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

biased news, etc. But an incident will illustrate the degree of success. After Italy was several months in the war, the party observed a great indifference on the part of the public toward the broadcasting of the General Staff communique at i P.M. daily. So the order was issued for all Italians in public places to stand and remain silent during its reading! They did so, with an ineffable calm.

The Fascist party itself was leaden with dissension. Among my friends and acquaintances were scores of party members who were hotly at variance with the party line. Shortly before Italy entered the war, the party leadership was changed, and some of the most ruthless members of the so-called Old Guard of fascism-the vet- erans of the street-fighting days-were sent out to enforce discipline. They were drawn chiefly from the element which was actively pro- German, such as the group surrounding the editor of the Regime fascista, Roberto Farrinaci, or from those old-timers whose only ethic was loyalty. These men imposed a partial terrorism, to be sure. But their success was chiefly in silencing the more serious criti- cism; they did not convert.

The Italian public was astonishingly well informed. The upper and middle classes had their Swiss newspapers and their short-wave, radios. The lower classes gleaned much while serving table or listen- ing to conversation in the salon. Their grapevine was raised to a high degree of speed and enthusiasm, if not of accuracy. A call from the kitchen brought all the domestics in an apartment house to their courtyard balconies in a trice. The milk boy sped news from one house to another, and the corriere bringing chickens and eggs from the country served as liaison officer between town and country.

"You may say that this is the reaction of the Italian people," said Guido Rocco, the gracious head of the Foreign Press Direction, when giving to the foreign press an answer to a speech of Churchill. Then he smilingly corrected himself, "No, you cannot say that. The speech hasn't been published in the press; the people are not sup- posed to listen to the foreign radio." And under cover of the laugh- ter, he added softly, doubtless inadvertently, "But of course we all know they do!" This from the chief of foreign propaganda.

As for the supporters of the war, it is impossible to number them accurately. They included the genuinely pro-German element in the party---those men who believed in the fascist ideal. They included



MORALE IN FASCIST ITALY IN WARTIME 437

the disciplined and loyal men and women who followed and did not question. And they included the ranks either of the passive or of the tolerant among the people at large. This conglomerate may well have embraced a majority of the people a year before Italy entered the war. On June io, I940, it was clearly a minority. It may improve its position henceforth, but when I left Italy this spring I doubt if ten per cent could have been found to vote either for continuing the war or for a fascist future. The proportion might well be smaller.

It is essential to understand how many are the conflicting forces which conditioned the people's attitude toward war propaganda.

In the first place, these were Italians. The complexity of their national character and of their social behavior is too casually dis- counted -in the Anglo-Saxon world. Italians become enthusiastic readily, kindle to the spark of a crusader, pour out a torrential loyalty, bruise their spirit against delays, betrayals, and defeats, and re- lapse suddenly into fatalism and apathy-emotionally spent. They are exuberant in the day of sunshine and plunge into orgies of despair in the day of misfortune. They have none of the stable, constructive mentality of the more northern peoples, or their resistance to ad- versity. The depth of their culture, indeed even the stones around them, give even the humblest peasant a lively consciousness of his- tory and of the transiency of the present. Speaking of fascism and war, he will give you his vernacular equivalent of "This, too, will pass." Italians are an exploited people, accustomed to having their thinking imposed upon them; and yet this very weight of steady oppression has built up in their systems an immunity to indoctrina- tion which may go far to explain their behavior today. Inevitably, such a people as the Italians would be the despair of a Goebbels.

Obviously, these Latin qualities operated substantially to vitiate the effect of propaganda. There are other factors, which can be classified about as successfully as one can pattern the unpatternable:

The Italians remain passionately nationalistic. Their traditional enemies have been the Germans. They don't see why they should do other than fear the Germans today. "We cannot win," people said to me over and over again, in different words, but with the same meaning; "even if we win, we lose-to the Germans. We would rather lose to the British."

They were by nature anti-National Socialist. They recognized in-



438 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tuitively that the rigor of genuine fascism, at which Mussolini was only play-acting, had been carried out to its grimmest conclusion by Germany, and they felt this to be the negation of their gracious, sunshine-filled way of life.

They were in large part pacifist. In the last war, it is true, they were aroused to a high militarist pitch; but only for a period. They remain a nation of arists, poets, musicians, tillers df the soil. War is repugnant to them. Their debilitating war-weariness increased through the Ethiopian and Spanish ventures to a point where all groups of Italians spoke to me about it with lackluster words or in actual agony of spirit.

Meanwhile there were characteristic deficiencies in the propaganda itself. For Mussolini was never the rigorous, relentless fascist type. He shifted from conservative to radical, from peacemaker to militarist as the international winds changed their quarter. He changed his advisers and officials readily so as to avoid the formation of opposition groups. All this made for disorganization, vagueness of policy-and for the temporary security of Mussolini's personal rule. The people recognized this essentially easygoing Italian softness be- hind the iron mask of fascism, and the propaganda was consequently denatured in their eyes. Furthermore, Italians are accustomed to political posing, to oratory which sounds flamboyant in its English translation but which in its own setting flows quite naturally from the Italians' inner urge to put on a good show and to see a good show.

Finally, it should be recalled that the Germans had had but a scant five years to come to terms with the new subtlety and effec- tiveness of modern propaganda and to learn from experience how to neutralize it. The Italians had nineteen years of fascism-more than enough for many a hypnotic chant to wear out its strength and for a healthy reaction to set in.

Much of the collapse of fascism, then, can be laid to the quirks and characteristics of its Italian environment. Nevertheless, I left Italy convinced that there was more of significance to the Italian story than merely the discrediting of one more Italian tyranny. In other countries, under more favorable conditions, the fascist idea may prove more tenacious. But its weakness must be basically the same-and its end should not be otherwise.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR



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