“Milan—The Fascisti, or extreme Nationalists, which means black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-year-old potshot patriots, have worn out their welcome in Italy. Banks and large commercial houses, who contributed the funds that launched the Fascist movement as a protective measure against as threatened Communist revolution, have withdrawn their support and the mass of the Italian press have turned solidly against the Fascisti. Meanwhile the Fascisti, solidly organized, are forming themselves into a political party and by a constant series of outrages, are keeping Italy in a state of class war.”—Ernest Hemingway, “Italy’s Blackshirts,” The Toronto Star Weekly, June 24, 1922, collected in Dateline, Toronto: Hemingway’s Complete Dispatches for The Toronto Star, edited by William White (1985)Papa was a better fiction writer than he was a foreign correspondent—or, at least, a political prognosticator. It was not that he had any love for Italy’s rising strongman: Seven months after writing the above, he was telling readers of the paper he was writing for in that early stage of his career, the Toronto Daily Star, that Benito Mussolini was “Europe’s Prize Bluffer.”
Maybe if Ernest Hemingway had been stationed in Italy longer (even beyond his time serving as a volunteer ambulance aide there in WWI), he might have better appreciated how the political winds were blowing and understood that the Fascists, far from having “worn out their welcome,” had within their grasp 20 years of iron-fisted rule ahead of them.
Others might argue that the signs of the times were already unmistakable: As early as this day in 1921, Mussolini’s Fascists had gone, in a one-month election, from zero to 35 members in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian parliament), and had picked up additional strength with the election of ten Nationalists, their political allies.
That election not only represented the Blackshirts’ first rung up the political ladder, we can see now, but a blueprint for political thuggery that would soon be followed by the Nazis in Germany, the Falangists in Spain, and other states in Eastern Europe. A single month of campaigning resulted in 105 dead and 431 wounded at the hands of Mussolini’s street goons. By October 1922, the month Il Duce was asked to form a government by the king of Italy, the Fascists numbered 300,000—tenfold their strength only two years before.
The 22-year-old Hemingway could only see the insuperable difficulties before the Fascists (by “fighting, burning, pillaging anything resembling communism,” they had guaranteed for themselves “a lifetime job” in northern Italy, where Marxism was strongest). He made a mistake that all too many people in the democratic West were making all the way up to the onset of WWII: believing that transparently silly leaders could be laughed out of existence before they damaged their countries or the larger world.
By 1936, when Francisco Franco made his power grab in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway would not make the same mistake. It was not that he had stopped being a political naïf (his gullible acceptance that Jose Robles was executed as a Fascist spy rather than for running afoul of Stalinists in the Republican government of Spain wrecked Hemingway’s two-decade friendship with John Dos Passos). But at least now he knew the cost of underestimating the Fascists.
Fascism was more than “a lie,” he told the American Writer’s Congress in June 1937: “The totalitarian fascist states believe in the totalitarian war. That, put simply, means that whenever they are beaten by armed forces they take their revenge on unarmed civilians.”
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