ally of man 'struggling and taking a part against evil.' H. G. Wells, God, the Invisible King (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. xiv. His was also a God of imperialism and conquest.
1. MUSSOLINI: THE FATHER OF FASCISM
1. Many authors have referenced these lyrics to demonstrate Mussolini's widespread popularity, but it is a common mistake to ascribe these lyrics to Cole Porter, the original author of the musical Anything Goes. Porter almost certainly did not write these lyrics. Rather, they were probably added by P. G. Wodehouse when he helped adapt the musical for the British stage. It also appears that there were multiple versions of the song with the Mussolini lyric, which hopscotched back and forth across the Atlantic.
2. Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1998) won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor and was nominated for Best Director. The title of the film, ironically enough, derives from Leon Trotsky. According to Benigni, shortly before the exiled Bolshevik was to be assassinated in Mexico, he supposedly looked at his wife in their garden and said, 'Life is beautiful anyway.'
3. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 245; Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 295.
4. 'Calls Mussolini Latin Roosevelt,' New York Times, Oct. 7, 1923, p. E10.
5. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 206; Norman Hapgood, Professional Patriots (New York: Boni, 1927), p. 62.
6. 'Hughes a Humorist, Will Rogers Says,' New York Times, Sept. 28, 1926, p. 29; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 27, citing Will Rogers, 'Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President,' Saturday Evening Post, July 31, 1926, pp. 8-9, 82-84.
7. Toscanini's relationship with the Mussolini regime was turbulent. For reasons probably more artistic than political, he refused to perform the fascist national anthem, 'Giovinezza.'
8. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Volume II: Muckraking/Revolution/ Seeing America at Last (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931), p. 799; McClure's view can be found in Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 28-29.
9. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 255, 257.
10. Those numbers evened out a bit as Americans became increasingly interested in the Soviets' five-year plan. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 51.
11. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 244.
12. La Follette's son, Philip, the famously progressive governor of Wisconsin, kept a picture of Mussolini in his office as late as 1938. Ibid., pp. 220-21.
13. Benito Mussolini, My Rise and Fall (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 3.
14. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Perennial, 1991), p. 96. Here's how Mussolini describes one incident in his autobiography: 'I caught her on the stairs, throwing her into a corner behind a door, and made her mine. When she got up weeping and humiliated she insulted me by saying that I had robbed her of her honor and it is not impossible that she spoke the truth. But I ask you, what kind of honor could she have meant?'
15. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 43.
16. Found in ibid., p. 224, n. 61.
17. The historian Hugh Gallagher writes of Roosevelt, he 'was no Thomas Jefferson, and neither a scholar nor an intellectual in the usual sense of the word. He had a magpie mind, and many interests, but he was not deep.' William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 27, quoting Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt's Massive Disability — and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985), p. 160.
18. Ivone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini (London: Odhams, 1964), p. 47.
19. Ibid., p. 49.
20. Mussolini wrote in a review of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, 'That which I am...I owe to Sorel...He is an accomplished Master who, with his sharp theories on revolutionary formations, contributed to the molding of the discipline, the collective energy, the power of the masses, of the Fascist cohorts.' A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 116. In 1913 Sorel said, 'Mussolini is no ordinary Socialist. One day you will see him at the head of a consecrated battalion, greeting the Italian banner with his dagger. He is an Italian of the 15th century, a condottiere. You do not know it yet. But he is the one energetic man who has the capacity to correct the weaknesses of the government.' Kirkpatrick, Mussolini, p. 159.
21. Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), p. 146; Joseph Husslein, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, p. 386; Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 11.
22. If all the workers were already dedicated socialists, there would be no need for a general strike because the society would have already made the transition to socialism. Neil McInnes, Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973). For the Mussolini interview, see Kirkpatrick, Mussolini, p. 159. For the quotation from Sharpton, see John Cassidy, 'Racial Tension Boils Over as Rape Case Is Branded a Hoax,' Times (London), June 19, 1988.
23. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 56.
24. Gregor, Ideology of Fascism, p. 116.
25. Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment,' Public Interest, no. 145 (Fall 2001).
26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 297.
27. For example, in 1924 the Italian Fascist theorist Giuseppe Bottai declared in a lecture, 'Fascism as Intellectual Revolution': 'If by democracy one understands the possibility granted all citizens of actively participating in the life of the state, then nobody will deny democracy's immortality. The French Revolution rendered this possibility historically and ethically concrete, so much so that an ineradicable right was born that exercises a tenacious hold on individual consciousness, independent of abstract invocations of immortal principles or developments in modern philosophy.' Reprinted in: Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 82.
28. See George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: Fertig, 2001); George L. Mosse, 'Fascism and the French Revolution,' Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 1 (Jan. 1989), pp. 5-26.
29. The observation that Rousseau's state is the most 'powerful to be found anywhere in political philosophy' is Robert Nisbet's. Robert Nisbert, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 52.
30. Fascism, according to the fascist theorist Giuseppe Bottai, 'was, for my comrades or myself, nothing more than a way of continuing the war, of transforming its values into a civic religion.' 'Fascism as Intellectual Revolution,' p. 20. Augusto Turati, a party secretary and self-proclaimed 'new apostle of the Fatherland's religion,' explained to massive rallies of Italian Youth that the new 'fascist religion' demanded 'the need to believe absolutely; to believe in Fascism, in the Duce, in the Revolution. Just as one believes in God...we accept the Revolution with pride, just as we accept these principles — even if we realize they are mistaken, and we accept them without discussion.'
31. 'Pope in Encyclical Denounces Fascisti and Defends Clubs,' New York Times, July 4, 1931; 'Everything Is Promised,' Time, July 13, 1931. See also Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
