Possess the Air, page 11
He took in a Marx Brothers show with Lauro de Bosis, who was in New York as part of his own lecture tour, and visiting with Marie Harjes, the American heiress he was then courting. “Foffino there, quite amusing,” wrote Gilbert, misspelling Lauro’s nickname. “The show, the Coconuts, was a kind of musical comedy which I have never seen even paralleled for inanity. A thing as perfectly imbecile as that is almost a work of genius… entertainments of this sort develop an intoxicated feeling in one and we went out on Broadway feeling quite drunk… When we got to Marie’s we simply invaded her flat and made some unsuccessful attempts at routing out a dinner.”
For a few days, he stayed at the home of Gino Speranza, an Italian expatriate who had an estate in Irvington on the Hudson River. To Gilbert’s Italian eyes, the North American countryside was delightfully untamed. “The scenery strikes me all over here as being very wild and savage,” he wrote. “It looks as if man had only just made his appearance in the continent and that one is following in the wake of pioneers. The roads seem to have only now been cut through the woods… at the same time, the frame houses, a temporary kind of construction at the best, are just dumped down anywhere in a clearing and have nothing of the settled and civilized character of Europe.” New York’s great buildings all seemed to be mish-mashes of Greek and Roman styles, with the notable exception of Grand Central Station. “Really to my mind the finest building I have seen of the kind. It is very simple and effective: no imitation or adaptation of European styles but a straightforward piece of work, art nouveau at its best.”
Gilbert found Toronto and its residents disappointing. “They are in a backwater and they think of it as a centre. They have the most hideous architecture that I have seen anywhere, and I am informed that ‘Toronto has the finest public buildings of any city in this continent,’ and they believe it!” His lecture at the University of Toronto, titled “Life in Ancient Rome under the Empire,” was well received, though he feared his attempts at humour ruffled local sensibilities. “When I showed my slide of the saloon at Ostia I said ‘but in the Province of Ontario I suppose I ought to call it a cafeteria.’ I got my laugh all right but they told me later that… half the prohibition people were there.”
He met Stewart’s friends, among them George, her disappointed suitor, who eyed him with hostility. “It is quite amusing to find myself a famous personage but sexually rather than intellectually. I am being scrutinized as if I were a curious specimen of a prehistoric monster or rather a kind of Paris or Tristan or Lancelot or one of the great famous lovers of antiquity.”
Montreal, where Gilbert delivered his lectures at McGill University, was more to his taste. “It is all covered with snow, but not a bit cold, at least one does not feel it.” He stayed at the Mount Royal Club, dined with the First World War general Sir Arthur Currie, whom he’d met on the transatlantic crossing, and went for a hike on the Mountain with members of the Molson brewing family. As much as he credited Toronto for nurturing Stewart—a city, he wrote, that “had the insuperable honour of producing you and of which you are the fairest flower”—he had trouble imagining a life there. “I do not say Montreal is beautiful but it does not give you a stomach ache.” If their future together included a life in Canada, he hoped she would consider making it anywhere but Ontario. “Quebec and Montreal seem somehow to be so much nearer. I suppose it is because they are so French but I feel that Toronto is really the Wild and Woolly West.”
On his return to Rome, Gilbert continued his research on the campagna and began work on his book on Rome on the papacy. He began to exchange passionate letters with Stewart, who had returned to Canada after completing her studies. Writing with a fountain pen on baby blue stationery, she signed her letters with a circle, to indicate the exact spot her lips had touched the paper. Gilbert, writing on the coffee-and-cigarette-ash stained letterhead of his men’s club, reminded her of how he’d kissed her shoulders the night she’d donned a long black evening dress. When he teased her by sending her postcards of Classical nudes locked in embrace, inscribed on the back with punning inscriptions in Greek and Latin, a terse note arrived in the mail asking him to desist.
“There are certain things which people of a certain class do and do not,” he was frostily informed by Stewart’s mother. “Your judgment on this point needs cultivating.”
By then, it was too late. In spite of the objections of their mothers, both of whom had reservations about the suitability of the match, in March, 1927, Gilbert and Stewart announced their engagement. It was agreed, to the groom’s chagrin, that the wedding was to take place not in civilized Rome—nor even in the more palatable Montreal—but in the backwater that was prohibition-era Toronto.
Gilbert still saw their future together in Italy, not Canada. Fascism was changing the nation, but in the aristocratic circles in which he moved, politics intruded only tangentially. When Dino Alfieri, the political undersecretary of the Fascist Party, was proposed for membership at Gilbert’s club—after being nominated by another prominent Fascist, Prince Potenziani, the Governor of Rome—the members voted to exclude him, provoking a minor scandal.
“A most frightful row!” he wrote his mother. “On about 86 votes there were 20 black balls. I do not know how far it is political or personal dislike or whether, as others think, it was done to spite Potenziani. The worst of it is that now no one talks of anything else.” Gilbert’s was almost certainly one of the dissenting votes. (He would later write to his mother: “On principle I black-balled all politicians.”)
In totalitarian Italy, where the state aspired to occupy all aspects of private and public life, lofty indifference was becoming less of an option. Gilbert was aware that his fellow scholars were being pressed into the service of ideology. Some, like Strong and Van Deman, enthusiastically endorsed the regime’s vision of reviving the glories of ancient Rome in the name of building a new empire. As a student of history, Gilbert had little time for such distortions. He made his opinions clear in the preface of his book on Rome and the papacy.
“It was natural,” he wrote, “that the new Italian nationalism should adopt as its own the traditions and glories of ancient Rome, of which it considered itself to be the legitimate heir. This idea, though natural, is completely false. Modern Italy has no more to do with ancient Rome than modern France with Charlemagne or modern England with King Arthur. The Roman Empire was Roman, not Italian; its last most serious war was against its revolted Italian allies, and when it ceased to be Roman it became international and universal. Let no one read my references to the Roman Empire as allusions to the present Italian state.”
When Rome and the Papacy was published in England in 1929, the year the Fascist state signed the Lateran Accords with the Vatican, such words would be read as heretical. Mussolini’s rhetoric in his rise to power had stressed the continuity between ancient Rome and modern Italy. As Il Duce’s attention turned to building a new Mediterranean empire, anyone—even the most dilettantish archaeologist—who questioned the legitimacy of that vision implicitly made himself an enemy of the state.
While Gilbert hoped his principles could keep him aloof from politics, there was one principle he held dear: that of speaking the scholarly truth. As he planned his future with his bride-to-be in Italy, he was still unaware that such a commitment would make pursuing a career—or even a life—in Mussolini’s Third Rome a dangerous proposition.
12
A Gilt-Edged Trap
In upper Manhattan, in the middle of the busy stretch of Amsterdam Avenue between 116th and 117th streets, there is an apparition straight out of fifteenth-century Florence. A Renaissance palazzo—or a very convincing replica of one—rises from amidst the Brutalist monoliths of Columbia University’s uptown campus. Cut into the stone beneath the dentil frieze that runs the length of its facade is the Romantic homage to Italy from Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “MOTHER OF ARTS—THY HAND WAS ONCE OUR GUARDIAN—AND IS STILL OUR GUIDE.”
Compared to the American Academy in Rome’s setting on the Janiculum Hill, the Casa Italiana’s setting is inauspicious. Despite being located on the relative eminence of Morningside Heights, the seven-storey structure’s main view is of the water-stained concrete of the neighbouring international affairs building. Yet the Casa Italiana was once Italy’s leading cultural outpost in America. It was designed, like the American Academy’s Main Building, by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, and decorated with exquisite Baroque furniture donated by Mussolini himself. Within a few years of opening, it would also become the home of the Italy America Society, the leading conduit for the dissemination of Fascist propaganda in the New World.
When Lauro de Bosis arrived in Manhattan on November 6, 1924, the Society had yet to relocate to its new headquarters uptown. He instead reported to a commercial building a block north of the New York Public Library. There he was warmly greeted by Irene di Robilant, a countess from Turin, just four years his senior. The daughter of a First World War general who fought off the Austro-German advance at Mount Grappa, di Robilant was uniquely suited to be the Society’s manager. Decorated for her work with the Red Cross during the war, she spoke excellent English. As charming and forceful as she was well-connected, di Robilant had cultivated a relationship with Prince Gelasio Caetani, the Italian ambassador in Washington, and helped oversee the establishment of the Society’s twenty-two branch offices in major American cities.
In the Society’s 43rd Street office, di Robilant showed Lauro copies of a handsomely printed brochure promoting his tour. The cover featured a photo of Lauro, his wispy teenage moustache now full and black, dressed in a black three-piece suit, his white collar cinched by a bow tie from his late father’s closet. The following page was filled with words of praise from the archaeologist Giacomo Boni, Gabriele d’Annunzio, and the Fascist Minister of Public Instruction. A program of twenty lectures was outlined, with themes ranging from “Recent Archeological Discoveries in Italy” to “The Woman in the Italian Conception.” Only one of them explicitly focussed on contemporary politics, a talk, “illustrated with moving pictures,” titled “Benito Mussolini and his Spiritual Ancestry.”
Lauro had at first hesitated to sign on to the tour, which would see him crossing the country from Baltimore to Berkeley, and heading north to Canada. At issue was not the gruelling schedule, nor the money—the fee was a handsome four thousand dollars—but his own sense of integrity. Lauro feared that, despite the Society’s claims to be strictly non-political, he would be called upon to discuss, or even justify, the Fascist takeover of Italy. His qualms had been assuaged by Chester Aldrich, the Society’s president. Aldrich was an architect trained at Paris’s Beaux-Arts, a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, and a lover of Italy with the reputation for being a staunch Liberal. He assured Lauro that the tour was intended to make Americans aware that “Italy belongs to the civilization of the whole world, which existed before Mussolini and will continue to exist when Mussolini has disappeared from the scene.”
When the Society was founded by an Italian banker at the end of the First World War, its mandate had been strictly commercial and cultural. Six years later, it was quietly remaking itself into a vehicle for political influence. Di Robilant was a keen supporter of Mussolini, and she would work hand-in-hand with Ambassador Caetani’s successor, the arch-Fascist Giacomo de Martino, to further the regime’s fortunes abroad. The man whose recommendation had brought Lauro to the United States, his father’s old friend Giuseppe Prezzolini, would soon turn the Casa Italiana into America’s most prestigious showcase for Fascism, a place where visiting officials were feted with the blackshirt marching song “Giovinezza.”
When Lauro entered the office on 43rd Street that day, he was walking into a perfect trap for a man of conscience. By associating his name with the Society, he was not only becoming complicit in the whitewashing of the blackshirts, but also the grandest of the Fascists’ projects: the remaking of Rome in the image of Il Duce.
In the 1920s, North Americans were of two minds about Italy.
For those wealthy enough to enjoy foreign travel, it was a nation that evoked sultry and serene Venice, the atmospheric hill towns of Tuscany, the sun-dappled beauty of Naples and Palermo, and all the glory that was Rome. For the great majority of Americans, Italy was something quite different: a benighted backwater that had sent Sicilians and other southerners flooding down gangplanks and turned San Francisco’s North Beach, Manhattan’s Little Italy, The Ward in Toronto, and Boston’s North End into teeming ghettoes. For many, these peasants, bomb-throwers and organ-grinders brought only crime, political extremism, and a superstition-ridden version of Catholicism. The long-running case of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists accused of a double murder in an armed robbery, stoked anti-Italian sentiment throughout the twenties. Rum-runners and crime bosses, who had grasped the opportunity to graft the codes of Sicily’s Mafia and Calabria’s ’Ndràngheta on the underworld created by Prohibition, became the bogeymen of upright teetotallers.
The Johnson-Reed Act, enacted five months before Lauro de Bosis arrived in New York, specifically targeted immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. In the first fifteen years of the century, close to one million Italians a year chose to seek their fortunes abroad, a mass emigration that eventually drained the nation of a third of its population. As many as a quarter million a year had settled in the United States. In response to a rising tide of Nativism, which played on fears that white Protestant Americans were in danger of being overwhelmed by swarthy Catholic newcomers, the Immigration Act of 1924 set the annual quota at a mere six thousand.
Because he seemed to be keeping Italians where they belonged—in Italy—Mussolini became the idol of American Nativists. One of their key texts was Black Magic, a celebration of the blackshirt revolution by the novelist Kenneth Roberts, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, then the highest-circulation magazine in the United States. Before the Fascists came along, the Mediterranean races, wrote Roberts, were turning Americans into a “hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.” For Roberts, Fascism “was the opposite of wild ideas, of lawlessness, of injustice, of cowardice, of treason, of crime, of class warfare, of special privilege; and it represented square-dealing, patriotism and common sense.” Mussolini, himself a “gluttonous worker,” was finally putting the Italian people to work. Il Duce, readers were told, had singlehandedly warded off the threat of Bolshevik revolution. According to the Nativists, dictatorship, not democracy, was the only system fit for unruly Latins.
In the years that followed, a more sophisticated class of writers would help buffer Il Duce’s image. George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher George Santayana approved his program, and the best-selling author Emil Ludwig deemed Mussolini as fit a subject for one of his hagiographic biographies as Napoleon and Lincoln. Ida Minerva Tarbell, whose diligent turn-of-the-century muckraking had helped bust Standard Oil’s monopoly, was offered $25,000 by McCall’s Magazine to “look into” Fascist Italy. Though she possessed only a few words of Italian, Tarbell returned with a series titled “The Greatest Story in the World Today,” filled with glowing reports of a leader who “worked and made people work.” A private interview with the prime minister confirmed all her preconceptions. Though Mussolini was no doubt “a fearful despot,” Tarbell wrote, “he had a dimple.”
Richard Washburn Child had been so impressed by what he had seen of Fascism during his time as American ambassador in Rome that he agreed to ghost write Il Duce’s English-language “autobiography,” compiled from notes by Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo, which was then serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Will Rogers, the most popular American humourist of the day, met Mussolini and reassured his readers in his syndicated column that he was a regular guy. “Dictator form of government,” wrote Rogers, in his folksy, telegraphic style, “is the greatest form of government; that is, if you have the right Dictator.”
The blackshirts were by then making their presence felt on the streets of New York. The Italian Library of Information on Madison Avenue distributed the latest books and pamphlets by Fascist publishers. (Gabriele d’Annunzio’s third son Ugo Veniero, born while the poet was sailing the Adriatic with Lauro’s father, managed the Library, when he could spare time from his real job of selling high-end Italian racing cars to millionaires and movie stars.) In 1924, the Fascist League of North America, an attempt to amalgamate the far-flung pro-Mussolini groups that had sprung up across the continent, was organized by Count Thaon di Revel. League members, following the lead of their brothers in Italy, specialized in wrecking the offices of the few anti-Fascist publications in New York, and made headlines when they crashed a rally in Newark, leaving six attendees with knife wounds. When 75,000 mourners filled Broadway for the funeral procession for the silent-screen idol Rudolph Valentino, blackshirts attempted to form an honour guard around his flower-wreathed casket before being driven off by anti-Fascists.
Matteotti’s murder, and the international outrage that followed, briefly put Fascism on the defensive. At a protest rally at Carnegie Hall sponsored by the Italian Chamber of Labor, the respected anti-Fascist diplomat Count Carlo Sforza accused Mussolini of being directly responsible for the killing. In Italy, a besieged Mussolini had initially responded to demands to broaden the administration by naming prominent nationalists to key ministries, a compromise that enraged Fascist hard-liners. As armed squadristi in Tuscany and the Romagna broke into prisons to liberate fellow blackshirts, Mussolini ended all doubts about who really held power by making a dramatic speech in the Chamber of Deputies.
