FLAGS/MUSSOLINI

Prelude To War :: Panels

Mussolini was at first treated with near-adulation in the U.S. press. The Saturday Evening Post featured him in three successive issues in 1928. Cole Porter used him in his song, “You’re the Top,” while Time Magazine featured him on its cover, paired here with a Time cover of President Franklin Roosevelt, who at one point referred to him as “that admirable gentleman.” The Wall Street Journal had led the chorus in a 1923 poem depicted here, praising Mussolini as “a new Columbus” whose strong hand was guiding Italians to a new society of “will and work”.

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Time Magazine devoted its covers to both Mussolini (April 8, 1940) and Roosevelt (June 10, 1940). The Roosevelt quote below refers to Mussolini as "that admirable gentleman": "I don't mind telling you that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable gentleman."

These three issues of the 1928 Saturday Evening Post (one of the most-popular weekly magazines of the time) featured excerpts from Mussolini's biography on May 5, May 19, and June 2.

The May 5 cover of the Saturday Evening Post highlights the Mussolini story as the feature of this issue. The poem beside it comes from the January 23, 1923 The Wall Street Journal. It lauds the Italian leader as no less than “A new Columbus,” a “two-fisted guy” who has awakened “langorous Italy” to become a “New world of will and work”—presumably one like the U.S.A. The poem notes particularly that Mussolini’s black-shirts, though in brutal “ways not graced or grooved,” had “curbed and quelled” the “Red nonsense” and “mischief” of Italian socialists and communists.

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