L'ombra lunga del fascio

Writing on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the exiled Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini explained the widespread support of Italian Americans for the Fascist regime during the 1920s and 1930s as a reaction to the discrimination they suffered in U.S. society. Because they were looked down on as inferior “dagoes” and “wops” many Italian Americans, he wrote, embraced an idealized image of a modern, imperial, and feared “new Italy” that provided them with a sense of ethnic pride in U.S. society. Several historians over the last thirty years have built on Salvemini's view that Italian American support for Benito Mussolini was a psychological rather than an ideological reaction to a feeling of inferiority in the host society, and they have shown how Italian Fascist authorities manipulated that sentiment to frame a definition of Italian identity that merged support for Mussolini with the dominant conservative interpretation of “Americanism.” In the end, Italian Fascists created and helped promote a definition of Italian American identity that made support for Fascism a key element of Italian American identity

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