Possess the Air, page 26
Men must reap the things they sow,
Force from force must ever flow,
Or worse; but ’tis a bitter woe
That love or reason cannot change
The despot’s rage, the slave’s revenge.
PART V
“A nationalist will say that ‘it can’t happen here,’ which is the first step towards disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”
–Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny.
23
The Hell It Can’t
By 1935, much of the world was finally seeing what had become clear to Lauro de Bosis a decade earlier. The brutal invasion of Ethiopia had provoked international revulsion, and Mussolini’s embrace of Hitler was starting to raise eyebrows. Since the March on Rome, foreign correspondents, Liberals, and people of conscience had been sounding the alarm about the violence and repression that was the essence of Italian Fascism. Yet it was only after over a decade of dictatorship that some of them were being heeded. The blank cheque handed to the regime, which had been credited with bringing American-style progress to the perennially undisciplined Italians, was about to be cancelled.
Mussolini, it turned out, wasn’t the regular guy—the “right dictator”—that Will Rogers had praised in his syndicated column. One of the first signs that public opinion was turning came in a 1931 speech delivered by General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps at a private luncheon in Philadelphia. Butler told the story of a friend who was invited to accompany Mussolini on a driving tour of the Italian countryside. Travelling at 110 kilometres an hour, Il Duce’s car struck a child, “grinding it to death under the wheels.” Butler’s friend reported that Mussolini ordered his driver to keep going, shouting, “What is one life in the affairs of a State?”
Mussolini’s travel companion, who was later revealed to be newspaper publisher Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, corroborated the story, adding that when he’d turned to “see a shapeless little form lying on the road behind us,” he was told: “Never look back, my friend. Always forward.” When the Italian government denied the story, President Hoover took the extraordinary step of ordering the first court-martial of a general since 1862. But the damage to Mussolini’s reputation had been done. The graphic account of the slaughter of an innocent child, as Butler’s biographer noted, “cast a shadow over the dictator’s heretofore almost immaculate image.”
Mussolini’s reputation in the United States was about to receive another blow—in fact, a powerful one-two punch—from a pair of early eyewitnesses to the rise of Fascism. Ever since being chased out of Rome in 1925 for reporting on Mussolini’s involvement in the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, the muckraking correspondent George Seldes had been plotting his revenge. Holed up in a Revolutionary-era house near South Woodstock, Vermont, Seldes spent years gathering testimony and documents that laid bare Mussolini’s overinflated war record and his shift from Socialism to Fascism. When the manuscript was completed in 1932, it was rejected by editors in New York and London as being inflammatory and potentially libelous. Publication was only deemed propitious after the invasion of Ethiopia. The brilliantly titled Sawdust Caesar, one of the great hatchet-jobs of political biography, was finally published in 1936. The first major exposé of Mussolini by an American journalist, it portrayed him successively as a lonely, beaten child, a thief, a draft dodger, an intellectual poseur, and a political opportunist addicted to violence.
“Reactionary dictators are men of no philosophy,” wrote Seldes, “no burning humanitarian ideal, nor even an economic programme of any value.”
The book began with a prescient warning. “Fascism not only exists in America,” claimed Seldes, “but it has become formidable and needs only a Duce, a Fuerher, an organizer, and a loosening of the purse strings of those who gain materially by its victory, to become the most powerful force threatening the Republic.”
Seldes’s words were given extra weight by the revelation of an alleged conspiracy to install a Fascist dictatorship in the United States. In 1934, the same General Butler who had dared to insult Mussolini astonished America by revealing that he had been approached by a representative of leading corporations—among them the same House of Morgan responsible for bankrolling Italian Fascism—to lead half a million First World War veterans on Washington to overthrow then-President Roosevelt. The new regime, Smedley reported, was to be led by Hugh S. Johnson. As head of the National Recovery Agency, the hard-drinking businessman distributed copies of a book on Italy’s corporative state by a leading Fascist economist and invoked the “shining name” of Mussolini in speeches. The “Business Plot,” as the press labelled it, was strenuously denied by its alleged perpetrators—among them Morgan’s Thomas Lamont—who dismissed it as “perfect moonshine.” The congressional committee charged with investigating the plot, by contrast, concluded there was “definite proof” that an American-bred Fascist putsch was “actually contemplated.”
As he was writing Sawdust Caesar, Seldes traded stories with his friend Sinclair Lewis, who had loaned him the money to buy his house in Vermont, and owned a property in nearby Barnard. Travelling in Italy 1921, Lewis had been delayed by a strike in Florence, where he’d watched Fascist thugs beating up workers in the street. “The so-called Communisti are workmen,” Lewis wrote to his father at the time, “union men, very few of whom are really Socialists at all; and the Fascisti are a kind of American Legion, but much more violent.” In Rome, where he’d been introduced to fettuccine al burro at Alfredo’s restaurant by Lilian and Edgar Mowrer, Lewis was regaled with first-hand reports from the Chicago Daily News correspondent about the Fascists’ punitive raids on Socialists in the countryside.
Soon after, when the Mowrers were transferred to Germany, they shared an apartment with Lewis’s wife Dorothy Thompson, then a reporter for Philadelphia’s Public Ledger. The globe-trotting Thompson was a spirited critic of dictators, and her analysis of Europe’s embrace of strongmen echoed, in plain-spoken prose, the philosopher Gaetano Salvemini’s scholarly definition of Fascism as the voluntary abandonment of free institutions.
“In country after country,” Thompson warned her readers, “under one slogan or another, the people are retreating from freedom, and voluntarily relinquishing liberty to force and authority, with instructions to bring order into men’s affairs.” For daring to belittle Hitler and draw attention to the persecution of Jews, Thompson became the first foreign journalist to be run out of Nazi Germany—an expulsion that made her famous and cemented her reputation as the nineteen-thirties’ “First Lady of Journalism.”
Mowrer would also incur the ire of the Nazis. While many North American newspapers—particularly the 28 owned by William Randolph Hearst, who was a guest at the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg—lavished praise on Hitler for bringing progress and defeating the Communists, Mowrer published the best-selling book Germany Sets the Clock Back. He also infuriated Hitler by reporting graphic accounts of anti-Semitic violence, gathered at covert appointments with his doctor, who happened to be the son of the grand rabbi of Berlin. After Storm Troopers gathered outside Mowrer’s office, threatening violence, he bowed to encouragement from the American embassy to accept a posting in Japan. The Nazi official who accompanied him to Zoo Station to make sure he got on his train asked: “And when are you coming back to Germany, Herr Mowrer?”
Mowrer turned and said, before fellow correspondents who had come to witness his expulsion: “Why, when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen.”
Familiarized with Fascist tactics through the Mowrers and Thompson, as well as his own experiences in Italy, Lewis spent long evenings in Vermont with Seldes, who shared all that he’d seen as a correspondent and learned in the research of Sawdust Caesar. “I had to relate every meeting with Mussolini,” Seldes would later recall, “every glimpse of him, every day I could remember of the year and more [I lived] in Rome under Fascism. He pumped day and night, lunch and dinner, cocktail hour and auto trips.” In the summer of 1935, Lewis sequestered himself at Twin Farms and set to work on a novel, completing the manuscript in two months of twelve-hour days.
The result was It Can’t Happen Here, the second major literary assault on Fascism’s reputation in America. Told through the eyes of Doremus Jessup, the Liberal editor of the Daily Informer in the fictional town of Fort Beulah, Vermont, the novel begins in a recognizable America, where Roosevelt is president and 28 million people are out of work. Jessup watches with concern as Senator Buzz Windrip, a plain-speaking populist who resembles Huey “Kingfish” Long, the recently assassinated governor of Louisiana, beats out Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination by promising a minimum income of $5,000 a year while railing against unions, Jewish bankers, and the Liberal press.
Jessup is at first perplexed that “there could be a dictator seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and gesticulating Fascists and the Caesars with laurels round bald domes; a dictator with something of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers.” He is then chilled as local layabouts and thugs don the white shirts of Windrip’s version of Italy’s Fascist militia, the Minute Men, and take over his town. Windrip, who professes to admire both the Founding Fathers and Mussolini, is endorsed on the radio by Reverend Prang, modelled on the Hamilton, Ontario-born Father Coughlin, who in his popular broadcasts from Detroit denounced bankers and Jews and celebrated Nazis and Fascists. Backed by Prang’s “League of Forgotten Men,” unemployed veterans who resemble the demobilized squadristi of Fascist Italy, Windrip easily wins the presidency. He sets up a “Corpo State,” modelled on Mussolini’s corporative state, in which unions are banned and the unemployed are rounded up and put to work in $1-a-day labour camps.
Jessup joins the New Underground, led by Republican Senator Trowbridge, and—like Lauro—turns his talent to writing anti-regime newsletters, which he slips into copies of Reader’s Digest in drugstores. When Trowbridge escapes by plane to the Fort Garry Hotel in Winnipeg, Jessup drives to Montreal, headquarters of the resistance, whose squabbling exiles recalls the anti-Fascist community in Paris. (“It is commonly asserted,” Jessup muses, “that without complete political independence the United States would not have developed its own peculiar virtues. Yet it was not apparent to him that America was any more individual than Canada or Australia; that Pittsburgh and Kansas City were to be preferred before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney and Vancouver.”) As the book ends—with Windrip deposed by one of his lieutenants, who is in turn ousted by rebellious generals—Jessup returns to the United States, where, pursued by posses of white-shirted Minute Men, he works to rid the last pockets of the Corpo-occupied Midwest of the dictatorship.
As satire, the hastily written It Can’t Happen Here was heavy-handed, but its vision of the form a right-wing dictatorship could take in the United States—particularly in the wake of General Butler’s revelation of the “Business Plot”—hit the mark. Early in the book, one of Jessup’s friends scoffs at the idea that a Fascist dictatorship could take root on native soil. “‘That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.’” Jessup responds: “The answer to that… is ‘the hell it can’t!’”
It Can’t Happen Here was published on October 21, 1935, just as front pages around the world filled with headlines about Italy’s aerial bombing of Ethiopian villagers. Lewis’s reputation—he had become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature five years earlier—ensured it was widely reviewed. In the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman called it “one of the most important books ever produced in this country,” and declared that reading it was “a public duty.” It would eventually become Lewis’s best-selling book, with 320,000 copies sold. A movie version, with Lionel Barrymore playing the role of Jessup, was planned but never filmed. (Lewis would claim the Hays Office, newly formed to enforce a moral production code on the movie industry, had banned the film to avoid offending Hitler and Mussolini.) The Federal Theater Project’s stage version of the book, which included Yiddish and Spanish versions, was attended by over a hundred thousand people in eighteen cities.
When Lewis learned that Nazis had started burning the book in Berlin, he instructed his German publisher to address him as “Sinclair Levy.”
By 1935, the Bagnanis were forced to face the obvious: they had no future in Mussolini’s Italy.
For five years, Gilbert’s strategy of pursuing his archaeological career outside of Italy seemed to work. The excavation of the town of Tebtunis had proved wildly successful. Stewart arrived in 1932, and a “dig house” made of mud bricks was erected so the couple could live in relative comfort. Gilbert oversaw a team of up to 160 workers—among them a resourceful native boy known as “Mohammed the Cat”—and an industrial railway was built to remove the sand from the site. A processional way was uncovered, revealing two colossal limestone lions, still on their pedestals. An entire church, frescoed with Coptic inscriptions, was also unearthed. Gilbert, who feared that clandestine diggers had already plundered the site, was overjoyed when the sand was removed from the cellar of a building that served as a public records office. The floor was a solid mass of papyri, which collectively provided a priceless record of life in second-century Tebtunis. After celebrating the find with a bottle of Champagne, they set to work unrolling the documents, some of which were three-metres long, and preserving them by attaching them to gummed transparent paper.
“At this work,” wrote Gilbert, “which requires infinite patience, very delicate fingers and excellent eyesight, my wife far outshone… myself and to her is due of the merit of preserving these magnificent documents.”
Some of the most important papyri were discovered in a vast cemetery of elaborately mummified crocodiles. Tebtunis had served as the sanctuary of the crocodile god Souchos. A live crocodile was kept in the temple, which the priests fed with grain, scraps of meat, and wine. Pilgrims were encouraged to make an offering by buying live crocodiles, which were slain and buried in family groups. The priests used discarded documents in the mummification process, and the Bagnanis spent long hours unwrapping the mummies to recover the papyri.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” wrote Gilbert, “they stank to high heaven. We started to do the job in the courtyard, but after a few days of it my wife struck and insisted the examination and disembowelling of crocodiles should take place on the dig, a mile or so away. Even then, with a high wind…”
But even in the Egyptian desert, the Bagnanis couldn’t escape Italian politics. In 1933, they learned that Victor Emmanuel III and his wife had expressed a desire to visit the site. The king was keen on archaeology, and had often personally contributed funds to support digs. A new road had to be built to welcome the royal visitors and their entourage. On the way to the dig, disaster struck: a driver in the caravan, after accelerating to one hundred kilometres per hour so one of his royal passengers could shoot a gazelle from the window, flipped his truck, killing a soldier. Though Gilbert fretted about the crash, the king seemed to take it in stride, and after a lunch was treated to a demonstration of the unwrapping of one of the pungent sacred crocodiles.
But papyri, Coptic churches, and mummified reptiles were not what the Fascists had in mind when they made money available for the dig in Tebtunis. They wanted evidence of Roman influence, not of the vigour of Egyptian civilization. At best, Oriental relics were fit to be plundered. After the invasion of Ethiopia, the Fascists looted the Obelisk of Axum and the Lion of Judah, transporting them to Rome for display. Gilbert was annoyed when Fascist bureaucrats ordered him to stop his work, and immediately drive to Dandarah, five hundred kilometres to the south, where he was instructed to make a cast of one of the walls of the Temple of Hathor. A replica of the enormous relief sculpture depicting Cleopatra and her first son, fathered by Julius Caesar, would be shown at the Mostra Augustea in Rome as proof of the Roman Empire’s influence in Egypt.
Because of his lack of Fascist credentials, it was easy for ambitious colleagues to sideline Gilbert and his work. After working alongside Gilbert on his dig, a well-connected papyrologist from Milan, Achille Vogliano, published a paper on Tebtunis, claiming the discovery of the most significant cache of documents unearthed in Egypt in a generation as his own. Gilbert, officially only the “acting director” of the site, was powerless to object. It was becoming obvious that, if he hoped to gain recognition for the work he’d done in Tebtunis, he would have to take the oath of loyalty to the Fascists.
At the beginning of 1935, when he was on the verge of obtaining his tessera—the card that would prove his membership in the Fascist party—Gilbert learned of his mother’s sudden death in Rome. That summer, the Bagnanis left Egypt and sailed for Canada to settle her estate. Shortly after they arrived, Stewart’s mother also died after suffering a heart attack in Toronto.
Gilbert would return to Tebtunis the following year, but only for a month. Not only politics, but also economics, were conspiring to make his dreamt-of return to Rome impossible. The previous year, the Fascists had passed a decree that would allow them to seize the assets of wealthy expatriates. If the Bagnanis didn’t move their residence from Italy, Gilbert would be forced to declare all his Canadian securities, and convert them to Italian lire on demand.
Making a life in Canada, which the Bagnanis had viewed as a last resort, now became their only option. For Stewart, it would mean a return to the land of her ancestors. For Gilbert—with his doubts about the extent to which civilization had penetrated into the “Wild and Woolly West” of Ontario—it meant expatriation and exile.
