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| Washington, D.C, Government charwoman. Gordon Parks/FSA, 1942. |
For a while now I've been thinking about Donald Trump and Benito Mussolini. There are some remarkable similarities. The bluster, the posturing, the incompetence, the success. And above all, they are both at heart clowns. Clowns who hate anybody competing for the limelight.
I now need to engage in one of my famous digressions.
Fred Trump Kills Funny Face
It's a little known fact that Donald's father Fred bought the old Steeplechase Park in Coney Island from the Tilyou family with the intention of building middle-income housing. That's what Fred did - middle-income, outer boroughs. On the facade of the park - which was basically a glass wall - there was a large image of Funny Face, the park's mascot, if you will. A clown face - I find it a bit scary.
The Coney Island History Project reports that Fred needed a zoning change from the city, which didn't come through. Then there was talk that the city was going to declare Funny Face a landmark. Trump threw a demolition party for his friends.
For what happened on September 21, 1966, I will quote from Gwenda Blair's 2000 book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire: "When the guests arrived at the Pavilion of Fun, the enclosure around the old Steeplechase entertainments, they found champagne, half a dozen bikini-clad models, TV cameras, and a wrecker's bulldozer. With all the rides sold and carted off, one of the few remnants of the past was the huge grinning clown's face painted on the pavilion's enormous glass window. Despite a steady drizzle, the bathing beauties posed with Fred Trump in the bulldozer's scoop and pulled down pieces of the pavilion that had been attached to ropes. At one point the new owner passed out bricks and encouraged guests to pitch them at the smiling face that had greeted generations of Steeplechase customers and served as the park's logo. Then the bulldozer got to work." (Pp. 219-220. Blair footnotes Michael P. Onorato, ed., Steeplechase Park: Sale and Closure, 1965-1966: Diary and Papers of James J. Onorato, 1998, pp. 57-58, which I have not seen. James Onorato was the general manager of the Steeplechase Park from 1928 to its closing in 1964.)
Let's call this Fred's own private version of Kristallnacht.
I do have a problem with this story. Funny Face was pretty high up on the facade. A brick weighs five pounds. (A baseball weighs less than half a pound.) I think you'd have to be a shot-putter to loft a brick that high. Maybe a brickbat, which is a shard of a brick, and which has been a well-known projectile since there have been bricks.
At any rate, there is a seductive charm to this tale. I imagine a young Donald there, throwing a rock at his competition and helping to kill him. And hoping to please his dad. Call it a formative experience, if it happened. At the time he was going to school at Wharton in Philadelphia, which does have academic standards, and so it's possible that he was actually in Philly, maybe even studying. It was a Wednesday, after all. However, even if he was a distance learner, Donald's later career showed him to be an apt student when it came to vandalism.
I don't think I've gotten to the bottom of this story; I'll leave that to an enterprising researcher who has time and skills that I do not possess. I did find a brief contemporaneous account in the New York Times. It doesn't mention the brick throwers.
Italy: From Travesty to Disaster
Back to Benito. Adolf Hitler dominates the story of fascism, so it's easy to forget that Mussolini was the first and lasted the longest, arriving in 1922 and departing in 1943.
One of the things I find instructive about Mussolini is the slow way in which he amassed his complete power. The famous March on Rome in 1922 simply made Mussolini the prime minister of a coalition government. He used his powers aggressively and won a parliamentary majority in 1924. Shortly thereafter Giacomo Matteotti, a principled, insightful, and very articulate member of parliament, was kidnapped and murdered. Consolidation of power proceeded and was essentially complete by the end of 1926.
Throughout this process I think it's important to watch not just the actions of the fascists but also the action and inaction of other powerful forces in the society, notably the pope, the king, the army, the large landowners, and the industrialists. I have the impression that, despite the optics, parliamentary democracy didn't actually fail because of its internal shortcomings; rather, other players were terrified that it would succeed, and they took steps to make sure that didn't happen.
Not that we should underestimate the seductive, iconoclastic power of the fascists. Mussolini had at his disposal hit squads, or squadri, composed largely of petty criminals and wannabe thugs. The squadristi would use the manganello, a kind of billy club, to beat people they didn't like. They would also make them drink castor oil. Another favorite tactic was the home invasion, where the homeowner's furniture and other belongings would be thrown into the street. The squadri also ransacked newspaper offices. (See Caroline Moorehead, A Bold and Dangerous Family, 2017, pp. 77- 78, 129-130, 140-141, 147. For a recent article in Slate, click here.)
Numerous judges and police officers simply loved the squadristi, and would go to great lengths to keep them out of jail, even before the March on Rome. (Moorehead, pp. 78, 82.)
The word "totalitarian" was coined in Italy, and by 1927 Italy was a totalitarian dictatorship. There were thought police (George Orwell's later term). The Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State, set up under a law of November 1926, was authorized to investigate and punish "any activity whatsoever capable of damaging national interests." Actions were not required; thought was enough. Suspicion was enough. And there was no need for the formality of an actual trial. (Moorehead, pp. xii, 161, 178, 188-189.)
And then there was il confino, essentially internal exile. The penal colonies were located on small islands off the Italian coast, including Ustica, Lipari, Pantellerea, and Lampedusa. There were very few escapes. (Moorehead, p. 189.)
As Mussolini put it, "Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." (Moorehead, p. 178.) The only thing he lacked was a modern industrial state. The Italy he took over was in fact a very poor, largely agrarian society. Despite efforts to modernize, that is what it remained throughout the fascist time. As late as 1936, 52 percent of the labor force was working in agriculture, and as late as 1950 Italy's Gross National Product per capita was 33 percent of the GNP per capita in the United States. (Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860-1990, 1993, pp. 32, 40.)
Mussolini did what he could to modernize - the Italian autostrada got its start in 1924. And the famous draining of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome was only part of a much bigger land reclamation effort, which in the south largely fizzled because of opposition from the great landowners, who would have lost some of their power. (Zamagni, pp. 258-262.)
Still, the country lacked factories, and it lacked natural resources to feed those factories. For instance, there is essentially no coal in Italy, and the situation for iron ore is not much better. Italy was the number one importer of scrap iron in the world during the years 1921-1936. (Zamagni, pp. 92, 286.)
Finally, the country simply lacked the managerial infrastructure required to run a modern country. This was a serious handicap even in peacetime, but the effect during World War II was disastrous. As American scholar J.J. Sweet has put it, the Italian defeat "resulted from the failure of the army as technical expert and military advocate, the failure of the government as overseer of national needs and planner and enforcer of national policy, and the failure of Italian industry as supplier of national needs." (Quoted in Zamagni, p. 289 fn. 58.)
To project power, you first need to have it. Even so, in the 1930's, like a moth drawn to a flame, Mussolini found himself attracted to a series of ill-considered foreign adventures.
In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. If you look at a map, it seems like there might be a rationale for this. Italy already had colonies bordering Haile Selassie's empire on the north and east - Eritrea and Italian Somalia - and after the war these three territories were consolidated administratively.
So, on a map, it looks like there may be some coherence to all this. But why would you want to conquer a country with no known natural resources? Maybe some coal? Maybe some iron ore?
Let's put Mussolini down for imperial glory. In a flash of high-tech modernity, he used poison gas on Ethiopian soldiers, some of whom actually were armed with spears. Hurrah. Let's have a parade.
Next up was Spain, as in the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini sent a corps of "volunteers" to help the fascist general, Franco, in his attempt to overthrow the legitimate Republican regime. And it was in Spain that Mussolini's regime started to display cracks that were visible to the non-blind.
In early 1937, Franco was trying to drive directly at Madrid, with the hope of finishing the war quickly. The Italian corps was deployed to the north of the city with orders to push south. Battle was joined around the town of Guadalajara, well north of Madrid. The Republican defenders included the Garibaldi Battalion of the International Brigades, composed of Italians who didn't like Mussolini.
Mussolini's troops were well armed for the day, with light tanks and aircraft - an early version of the mechanized armies that swept across Europe during World War II. What they lacked was a good sense of how to use these weapons in adverse conditions. When it rained, the Italian planes couldn't fly. The Republicans counterattacked, and the Italian fascists broke and ran. So much for invincibility. (On Guadalajara, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 1961, chapter 46.)
Time for a word about noise. Cacophony is the sound of democracy. It can be unpleasant, although I'm quite fond of the Jimi Hendrix version of the Star Spangled Banner. Disagreement does cause dissonance.
In a totalitarian dictatorship, there is no cacophony. There is harmony (sometimes called message discipline). The problem with harmony is that too much uniformity can make it monotonous.
And monotony can lead to channel surfing. There are always alternative channels. The people themselves are constantly spawning their own narratives, often quite inventive. The dictator needs the undivided attention of his people; his message must blanket and suffocate all the natural variation that occurs in any human society possessed of language.
This is why the message masters are constantly looking for new variations to throw into the mix. Maybe just a little pogrom.
The message masters can also control the volume, and this is what happened when Italy was about to enter World War II. An eerie silence descended over Italy. Not only were the public megaphones silent about the way forward; the many, many private networks in Italy were also without new content. For an idea of what this felt like, see Iris Origo's A Chill in the Air (2018).
The war itself was a slow-moving catastrophe for Italy. In 1943, the power centers did what they should have done at the beginning and removed Mussolini from power. It was, of course, too late. The war had come to Italy, with the Allies doggedly fighting their way up the Italian boot, and the German army contesting pretty much every hill, every valley.
Iris Origo paints a vivid picture of what it was like to have your land fought over by two foreign armies, neither one in a particularly good mood: War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944 (1947).
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| Tenant farmer family, Wagoner County, Oklahoma. Russell Lee/FSA, 1939. |
Jim Crow
Attracted as I am to the Italian example, and much as Trump seems to unconsciously emulate Benito Mussolini, I suspect that many of Trump's squadristi have a different model in mind: the Jim Crow South.
Jim Crow was originally the name of a character in the old blackface minstrel shows; he lent his name to an entire period of southern history, which began with the end of Reconstruction in 1877. That was when the North, after winning the Civil War, and after spending more than a decade trying to foster a liberal, integrated democracy in the defeated South, figured out that the task was going to be extremely hard and take a very long time, and walked away, leaving the newly emancipated southern blacks to the tender ministrations of southern whites, who, like the Bourbons, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Southern whites did realize that they couldn't bring back formal slavery, so they set about creating a reasonable facsimile of the antebellum South. Central to this project was the oppression of blacks.
It took a while for the full structure of Jim Crow to be erected. A landmark came in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the separate but equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Jim Crow eventually receded during the Civil Rights Revolution. Key dates here are the integration of the armed forces in 1948, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It's worth noting that the Civil Rights Revolution is not over. It continues to this day.
So what did the Jim Crow South look like? It was a desperately poor, backward agrarian society where the power structure maintained itself through a reign of terror. At the apex were the lynchings, which are finally being properly memorialized. But we should not forget the ongoing daily acts of intimidation, and also the jokes - the many, many racist jokes that whites told one another, and their children, all directed at reinforcing the racial status quo.
I think we tend to focus on the racism and the terror, the de jure segregation, and depriving black people of the right to vote; and perhaps we focus less on the poverty of this society. There were always a wealthy few; but the vast majority were in a very poor way. Call it a banana republic that grew cotton instead of bananas.
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| Alabama sharecroppers. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936. |
Here are a few numbers. Between 1880 and 1930 the South's per capita income was generally between half and two-thirds of that of the United States as a whole. Retail sales in 1930 were about one-third of the national average. (See Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South, 2013, pp. 24, 58.)
Nor were southerners particularly good stewards of their land. As Wright puts it, "A common feature of economic backwardness is the destruction of natural resources." In 1933 the National Resources Board found that "nearly one-third of the land area in the southern states could be classified as 'severely impoverished,' 'soil washed off,' or 'devastated.'" This was more than 60 percent of the "impoverished or devastated soil" in the entire country. As for forests, by 1920 an estimated 156 million acres of forest land had been cut over in the South. A government observer called it "probably the most rapid and reckless destruction of forests known to history." (Wright, p. 60.)
Wright notes, "On the eve of the Great Depression, the South appeared to have settled into a lasting political-economic equilibrium, dominated by an elite planter class" (Wright, p. 56). That changed after the 1929 stock market crash, the advent of the Depression, and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president.
As Wright puts it, "the New Deal kickstarted the modern southern economy." Perhaps the most famous federal project was the Tennessee Valley Authority's electrification program. In 1933, 2 percent of households in the Tennessee Valley had electricity; by 1945, 75 percent of households were electrified. (Wright, pp. 59, 64.)
And Atlanta got a new sewer system. "The old system was disgraceful, polluting streams with human and industrial waste, generating a number-one ranking for the city in diphtheria deaths and a typhoid rate twice the average for other large urbanized areas." Of all the projects carried out in the South by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Atlanta sewer system was the largest. It was basically free to the locals, and it was a critical building block for Atlanta's postwar progress. (Wright, pp. 63-64.)
As a result of all this investment, the southern economy started to change, and people began to talk of the "New South." But while the economy may have been changing, the society was not. The reign of terror continued, most notably with the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.
I would like to suggest that the Jim Crow South was a sinking ship. It's true that the guests at the Captain's table in the first-class dining room may not have noticed, but the people drowning in steerage were well aware. And they voted with their feet.
In what has been called the Great Migration, blacks flooded out of the South. In every decade between 1890 and 1970, what demographers call net migration of blacks was outward bound. The biggest decades were 1940 to 1970; in each of these decades (again, on a net basis) more than a million blacks uprooted themselves and left the South. Since 1970, the situation has reversed and the South has experienced continuous net immigration of blacks. (Wright, p. 143.) I wonder why that happened. Civil Right Revolution, anyone?
Interestingly, the Jim Crow South also saw substantial net emigration of whites between 1880 and 1960, with the peak decades running from 1910 to 1950 (Wright, p. 143). If you'd like to know what being a white sharecropper was like in the 1930s, read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
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| Deputy Sheriff, Gonzales, Texas. Russell Lee/FSA, 1939. |
What's So Attractive About Jim Crow?
For a very long time in this world, the people at the top of societies have used fear and want to keep the people below them - the "little people" - in line. Then along came Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proclaimed his Four Freedoms at the beginning of World War II. They were freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. They were the bedrock of the social contract that allowed the United States and its allies to come together and win World War II.
And it looked for a while as if these freedoms would stick. But the power of fear and want as tools of government is very seductive. I think this is part of what certain people are talking about when they talk about "the good old days."
Another piece of it is the shape of society. For a long time we've been taught that American society looks like a pyramid, with a few rich people at the top, a lot of middle-class people in the middle, and a bunch of poor people at the bottom.
Traditional societies didn't look like that. They looked more like a chess pawn, with a little bulb of people at the top (the aristocrats), a thin stem running down below that (the bourgeoisie, mainly assistants and enablers of the aristos), and a large flat base of poor people, whose primary concerns were food, shelter, and being as close to invisible as possible whenever their masters came around.
Trump's squadristi come in a number of different forms, of course, but I think they all share a common nostalgia for this traditional approach to society and governance.
What I do not understand, though, is where they expect to fit in this chess pawn. Some, I suppose, think they'll be in the little bulb at the top. Good luck with that. Others may see themselves in the very thin - thin to the point of fragility - stem, the piece that both holds the top and bottom together, and provides a buffer between the two. Not a lot of openings in the stem, and the places are guarded with a desperate ferocity. Nobody wants to fall out of the stem, because then you're down at the bottom.
Do any of today's revolutionaries on the right actually see themselves winding up as one of the down-trodden poor in the new-old society they hope to create?
I suspect not.
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| Mule, Hale County, Alabama. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936. |
See also Fascism, Narcissism and Dictatorship, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?
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