Unto the Sons (94 page)

With the courage of a jackal at the heels of a bolder beast of prey, Mussolini has now left his ambush. His motives in taking Italy into the war against the Allies are as clear as day. He wants to share in the spoils which he believes will fall to Hitler, and he has chosen to enter the war at the precise moment when he thinks that he can accomplish this at the least cost and risk to himself. This is the end of all these weeks of hesitation, all the eager watching, all the cautious sniffing of the air, all the splendid courage held in the leash so carefully for some sign of the weakness of its victims. Fascismo marches when it thinks that it smells carrion.

Suddenly signs of anti-Italianism were heightened in the United States: “dago” and “wop” and similar insults were heard more frequently in the nation that contained five million residents of Italian ancestry; the Duce was burned in effigy in many American cities; and the Italo-American members of several “Italian” clubs in the country changed the names of their social organizations to “Columbus” clubs, seeking to link their Mediterranean roots to the laurels of the fifteenth-century sea captain from Genoa.

Many American diplomats and businessmen who had accepted honors from the Italian government in the past now returned their medals and scrolls; and when New York’s Mayor La Guardia was asked if he would do likewise with the combat medals he had received as a World War I ally of Italy, the ex-officer in the United States air force shook his head and said he would save them to wear during future bombing missions—leaving no doubt that, if the United States joined France and Britain against Mussolini and the Nazis, he was ready to attack his ancestral homeland.

This was the public position of nearly all Italo-American politicians and celebrities after Roosevelt’s speech; they were Americans first, Italians second. And yet in the privacy of their homes, away from the newspaper reporters and the grandstands of Columbus Day parades, many hoped and prayed that the United States would remain neutral in this latest conflict in Europe. Not only did they have close relatives and friends
living on the other side, but they were also less disenchanted with the Duce privately than they pretended to be in public. Mussolini had achieved much in Italy, bringing ethnic pride to Italians throughout the world. In a nation of weak political leaders and sycophants he had symbolized boldness and strength, posing bare-chested and muscular with bathers and fishermen at the beach, and guiding his horse over the hedges at Villa Borghese in Rome, and helping peasants, bricklayers, and blacksmiths do their jobs (boasting that as a blacksmith’s son he had grown up a manual laborer); and simultaneously he showed no humility toward the pin-striped statesmen of Britain, France, and the United States, those ungrateful nations which had “mutilated” Italy’s share in the spoils of World War I, and against whom he was now prepared to mobilize as well as bargain, for as his mentor Machiavelli had written and as the Duce often quoted: “armed prophets won and the unarmed perished.” Mussolini at the same time had made peace with the Church, which his political predecessors in Italy had been unable to do since the Risorgimento; and in the once disorderly streets of the capital and other major cities, he had restored order and public safety—cracking down on beggars and thieves, squelching the striking unions and disruptive Communists, and exiling or incarcerating the subgovernment of the Mafia by giving carte blanche to the enforcers of Fascist law, who cared little about fair trials.

If Mussolini did not get all of Italy’s trains to run on time, he certainly improved the rail system, which had previously been geared to the convenience of conductors; and another domestic accomplishment was his vast reclamation programs, his conversion of such areas as the malarial Pontine marshlands south of Rome into habitable new towns such as Littoria. At a ceremony that celebrated the completion of that project, he announced: “Once, in order to find work, it was necessary to go beyond the Alps or cross the ocean. Today the land is here, only half an hour away from Rome. It is here that we have conquered a new province.” Driving from Turin to Milan, leading a column of five hundred cars, Mussolini opened the
autostrada
. Riding on horseback in Rome along a road lined with pine trees and the ruins of the caesars, Mussolini inaugurated the Via dell’Impero. Earlier on the same day he had presided over the opening of a sports complex with a stadium surrounded by sixty marble statues of athletes and a fifty-five-foot-high gold-topped obelisk.

To the semiliterate farm boys and urban drifters who were unable to avoid conscription, and whose lack of loyalty to anything larger than their families had long contributed to Italy’s reputation for producing many of the world’s worst soldiers, Mussolini delivered impassioned speeches, ex-horting
them to emulate the Roman warriors—to forget what they might have heard about Caporetto, and to focus instead on the monument builders who had turned stone into marble and had founded an empire that the Fascists stood ready to revive by following the Duce’s dictum:
Credere, Obbedire, Combattere!
—Believe, Obey, Fight! These words were displayed in military barracks and recruitment centers around the nation, and were stenciled on public buildings large and small in cities and towns from Milan to Maida; and Mussolini heralded the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as the first step toward the restoration of the once great Italian Empire. Married couples in Italy and the United States donated their gold wedding bands to the Duce to help defray the cost of his quest, and an Italo-American rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in support of the Ethiopian invasion drew a crowd of more than twenty thousand, including such prominent Italo-Americans as Mayor La Guardia. This was five years
before
Roosevelt’s stab-in-the-back speech, and Mussolini’s popularity in the United States at this time (except among blacks and left-wing organizations opposing Italy’s entry into Africa) was high not only among La Guardia’s Italo-American voters—and thus it was politically expedient for him to join them at Madison Square Garden—but among average Americans across the country as well. The Duce’s name, in fact, had been featured in a 1934 hit tune by Cole Porter: “You’re the top—you’re Muss-o-li-ni.…”

Among those attending the Madison Square Garden rally in 1935 was Joseph Talese. He had brought his wife, Catherine, and their three-year-old son to visit Catherine’s family in Brooklyn for a few days, and he left them there on this evening while he took the subway alone into Manhattan. When he told his wife’s parents where he was going, there had been some demurring within the large family gathering at the di Paolas’ dinner table—not from Catherine’s father, Rosso, who was apolitical, but from Catherine’s brother-in-law the Maida-born musician Nicholas Pileggi. As boys in the village, Joseph and Nicholas had marched together as Young Socialists; but since Joseph’s immigration to America, and his assimilation into the conservative community of Ocean City, he had left all traces of his Socialism on the other side of the ocean. Pileggi, on the other hand, had become even more committed to Socialism in the United States: in his musicians’ union in New York he had solicited financial support and recruited followers for the Socialist leader Norman Thomas; and as a frequent employee of the Empire Shoe factory in Brooklyn (where Pileggi and other Italo-American musicians supported themselves
between jobs with the band) he had formed a small but active anti-Fascist workers’ group that attended the speeches and distributed the left-wing pamphlets and newspaper of one of Mussolini’s archenemies in America, the Italian publisher and anarchist Carlo Tresca.

Tresca, a tall, gray-bearded intellectual, was born into a prominent family in the central Italian town of Sulmona, seventy-five miles east of Rome. Sent as a boy to the seminary by his mother, Tresca would emerge (as had his hero Garibaldi decades before him) with a loathing for priests that would last a lifetime. When Tresca later became a newspaper publisher, it was his priest-baiting more than his radical politics that would bring him into conflict with Italian law. Not only did he believe that many priests were obsessed with sex, but also he believed he had the right to print the clergymen’s names and the condemning evidence that supported his view—a journalistic service that led to enough libel suits and prison terms to prompt his immigration to the United States.

First as the editor of
Il Proletario
, and finally as the publisher of
Il Martello
, Tresca intended for his words of warning and rage to arouse the Little Italys of America. His editorials condemning the moral hypocrisy of the Church, the venality of the
padrone
system, the prejudicial verdict of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, the brutality of the strikebreaking goons in the railyards of the Midwest and the sweatshops of the East became the manifesto of a new Italo-American Risorgimento to such readers as Nicholas Pileggi. After hearing Tresca speak at an anti-Fascist rally in Manhattan’s Union Square in the early 1930s, Pileggi became a devoted follower—and a nuisance to his cousin Joseph whenever they were reunited at the di Paolas’ dinner table for Christmas or other family gatherings in Brooklyn. Here, until dawn, over bottles of wine and bowls filled with cracked walnut shells, the merits and demerits of Mussolini were debated by these native sons of southern Italy and their kinsmen and friends, just as happened around tables throughout the United States. Mussolini had divided these Italian immigrants as their craggy villages and towns overseas had been divided for centuries, finding common ground only during earthquakes and other disasters. Mussolini was Italy’s newest disaster, Pileggi argued, while his cousin said that it was too early to tell. Embarrassed by the lowly status of Italians in America, Joseph had found comfort in the Duce’s identity with ancient Rome, and with Italy’s preeminence in classical music, poetry, and art.

“The Italians were bringing art and culture to the world when the damned Anglo-Saxons were living in caves like savages and painting their faces blue,” Joseph shouted one evening, angered because his cousin and
one of his anarchist friends seemed to be debunking Italy while praising the cultural achievements of the British Empire, unhampered by the repressions of Catholicism and the Fascist state. The English were Joseph’s least favorite people. He blamed the English for double-crossing the Italians at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919—the English and their Anglo-Saxon kinsman in the American White House, Woodrow Wilson (who had once referred to Italians in America as a “cursed rabble”); and now as Mussolini was expanding into Ethiopia, it was the English, of
all
people, who were decrying colonialism as they welcomed the imperious Haile Selassie into London as a deposed hero.

Joseph of course kept such thoughts to himself when he was in Ocean City, where they might not be appreciated by his Anglo-Saxon clientele. But during these nocturnal quarrels in Brooklyn, after Rosso and Angelina had gone to bed, and while the younger wives were washing dishes in the kitchen with their children slumped drowsily in high chairs, pieces of cake and fruit resting on the floor beneath their feet, Joseph spiritedly and single-handedly defended Mussolini against Nicholas’s left-wing cabal, most of them disgruntled strong unionist musicians with their fingernails blackened from working in a shoe factory,
all
of them apostles of the atheist and anarchist Carlo Tresca, who, in Joseph’s view, was probably no less a Fascist than that other product of impassioned journalism, Benito Mussolini. Whether it was from the far left or the far right, these two leaders were after the same thing—control of the masses. Joseph was neither a devotee of nor an authority on the Fascist movement in Italy, having left the country two years before Mussolini’s takeover in 1922; but he doubted that Italy in the interim could have become worse than it was. In any case, Joseph’s pride and defensiveness about his Italian origins made him resentful of those who debunked Italy—which, at long last, was now trying to rise above its reputation as an unmilitaristic nation of bad soldiers, retreaters, and
imboscati
, shirkers. What a relief to have an Italian leader who invaded
other
nations for a change, as opposed to remaining at home and hiding in the hills waiting to surrender to yet another conqueror of Italian soil. If Joseph was not a Fascist at heart, his cousin and the other turncoat Italians made him sound like one whenever he came to Brooklyn.

Each time he arrived it seemed that his cousin had packed the room with even
more
soiled-fingered Socialists and anarchists who were eager to shout down Joseph’s every pro-Italian statement. Being pro-Italian now was unfortunately construed as being pro-Fascist, but Joseph firmly expressed what he felt. Sometimes he wondered how he and Nicholas had
become so different politically. Though born and reared in the same place as Joseph, and under the same guiding light of Saint Francis, Nicholas had become an atheist, had refused to baptize his infant son, had regretted marrying Susan di Paola in church. He had recently admitted this to Joseph, who was shocked into silence; and Joseph was quite sure that Nicholas would
never
acknowledge his Catholic wedding to his Jewish and Protestant friends in Union Square, those proponents of Emma Goldman, John Reed, Norman Thomas, and others who joined Tresca in denigrating Mussolini and the Italians—no doubt contributing to the self-loathing that many Italians such as his cousin felt about themselves these days. Joseph would never tell Nicholas this to his face, but he truly believed it. And if the Italo-Americans were still the most undesirable immigrant group in the United States, as an opinion poll had recently announced, then Joseph blamed his countrymen. Instead of supporting one another like other minorities, trying to combat prejudice by channeling their energies into a strong national organization such as B’nai B’rith, or the NAACP, the Italo-Americans squabbled among themselves; and
if
they formed organizations, they formed so
many
organizations—Garibaldi clubs, Mazzini clubs, Columbus clubs, Sons of Italy lodges, and dozens of others, each headed by a leader who was jealous of the other leaders—that the Italians in America could barely agree on the rules for playing
bocce
. What could be done with such people? Mussolini in Italy was trying to beat some sense into them, to bind them in
fasces
as the great caesars had done—to elevate them, to educate them about the glories of their past. If this was an integral part of the Fascist credo, Joseph saw no reason to oppose it. He had always been responsive to monument builders, miracle workers in heaven, strong leaders on earth. Joseph, like many men who had not grown up around their fathers, tended to idolize.