Making my headquarters at Rome, I went over the country fairly well, particularly the industrial sections. I visited Turin with its hydroelectric developments, its great Fiat factory, its artificial silk, all plants of the first order. I spent some days in Milan, visited the great Pirelli plant, at the moment making underground cables for Chicago. I saw what was left of the cooperatives at Bologna. I climbed into that plucky little independent Republic of San Marino. Mussolini had been there just before I arrived. They were all for him. He worked and made people work. That is what had made San Marino.
I went south into Calabria, over into Sicily—always looking for the effects of the new regime on the life of the people. There was no doubt sensible things were going on—redemption of land, extension of water power, amazing efforts at wheat production; and the people were accepting the regime with understanding, realists that they were.
The first thing that springs to my mind now when I recall those months in Italy is a long procession of men, women, and children bent in labor. They harvested fields of rice, wheat, alfalfa, laying grain in perfect swaths; they sat on the ground, stripping and sorting tobacco leaves. Tiny girls, old women crowded narrow rooms, embroidering with sure fingers lovely designs on linen, fine and coarse; they cooked their meals before all the world in the narrow streets of Naples; they carried home at sunset from the terraces or slopes of mountains great baskets of grapes, olives, lemons—young women straight and firm, their burdens poised surely on their heads, old women bent under the weight on their backs. They drove donkeys so laden that only a nodding head, a switching tail were visible; they filled the roads with their gay two-wheeled carts, tended sheep, ran machines, sat in markets, spun, weaved, molded, built—a world of work.
Mingled with these pictures of labor were equally vagrant ones of these same men and women at play: holiday and Sunday crowds filling the streets, the roads, the cinemas, the dancing pavilions, the squares of little towns that traced their history back clearly more than two thousand years. In those squares, gay with flags and streamers and light and booths, in the evenings, throngs held their breath as to the notes of soft music the lithe figures of the ropewalkers passed high overhead with slow and rhythmic steps.
It was hard to realize when I looked on them that six years earlier these same people had been as badly out of step as they were perfectly in step at the present moment, that instead of rhythmic labor, there was a clash of disorder and revolt. Men and women refused not only to work themselves, but to let other people work. Grain died in the fields, threshing machines were destroyed, factories were seized, shops were looted, railway trains ran as suited the crew. Sunday was a day, not of rest, amusement, prayer, but of war; fêtes were dangerous, liable to be broken up by raids. Instead of the steady balance, orderly action, so conspicuous today, were the disorganization, anger, violence of a people unprotected in its normal life: a people become the prey of a dozen clashing political parties and not knowing where to look for a Moses to lead it out of their Egypt. How could it be, one asked, that in so brief a time a people should drop its clubs and pick up its tools?
There was only one answer: Mussolini. Already he was a legend, a name everywhere to conjure with. I used it myself after I had talked with him, on scared gentlemen to whom I had letters of introduction, and who feared quotation: “But Mussolini saw me—talked with me.” Nothing too much trouble after that.
But what kind of man was this dictator?
“You must go and see Mussolini,” our able and friendly Ambassador Henry P. Fletcher told me one morning while I was working on the Embassy’s voluminous records of what had gone on in Italy since the end of the War. I balked.
“I am not ready with the questions I want to ask him.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Fletcher, “just go down and have a chat with him.”