Books: Resoling the Italian Boot

WHAT To Do WITH ITALY—Gaefano Salvemini and George La Piana —Duell, Sloan and Pearce ($2.75).

Gaetano Salvemini, the U.S. citizen who was recently rumored to be a United Nations choice to form a post-invasion Italian Government, this week published* his views on the future of Italy, in a book guaranteed to exasperate practically everybody who reads it.

Certain to be exasperated are:

> The U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, the Vatican Secretariat of State, whom Professor Salvemini regards as a trio of Borgias engaged in a dark plot to strangle Italian democracy in its bassinet.

> Nearly everybody who believes that one of the first tasks of U.S. and British forces occupying Italy will be to restore law & order, and that to do this U.S. and Britain will have to use horse sense and some leniency in dealing with monarchists, Catholics and even former fascists.

Machine and Machine Guns. This is just what Professor Salvemini, a Mazzini republican of the old school,† is afraid of. Like many Britons and Americans, he believes that a social upheaval will result from the invasion of Italy. He fears that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Vatican and many Italian reactionaries are in tacit agreement to check this social revolution by keeping intact the machinery of the Fascist state and local administrators. This requires that the Italian army “remain faithful to the Monarchy and to its own chiefs, so that it will not hesitate to machine-gun the rebels.”

After the first attempts at general revolt have been quashed, and the British and Americans have got hold of all key positions of communications and public services, it will be easy to maintain order. King Vittorio Emanuele will then probably abdicate in favor of his son, who will restore Italy’s pre-Fascist constitution. He will also invite the President of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations to act as the Premier. This is Dino Grandi, former Fascist Ambassador to London, who is rumored to have engineered Mussolini’s downfall. “After [Archbishop] Spellman’s visit to the Vatican,” Salvemini notes darkly, “[Grandi] was made a ‘cousin to the King.’ ”

Same Shirt, New Color. Later, some of the extreme Fascist laws will be repealed. But under the pretense of urgency and the guise of martial law “the government will continue to keep the press, the associations, the assemblies, and all labor and trade unions under strict control. What was formerly the Fascist militia will don a shirt of another color and take another name, but it will continue to act as the political police of the regime.”

Thus, Salvemini concludes, a “legitimate” government “protected by foreign armies of occupation . . . supported in every way possible by the Vatican, and having several divisions of its own police force” will proceed to the demobilization of the army and a general disarmament. The “socalled Parliament and Senate, survivals of the Fascist period, would be put to work passing a series of ‘amendments’ to the old constitution, by which the executive bodies would be given extensive powers and made independent of the whims of the legislative bodies. This would be called ‘the American system,’ thus saving the face of the Atlantic Charter, as well as the faces of all President Roosevelt’s other proclamations.”

Marx or Metternich. Cries Salvemini: If this is what the U.S. and Britain want, “keep Mussolini in power, deal directly with him … it would make no difference.” (Professors Salvemini & La Piana wrote their book before Mussolini fell.) For Salvemini is less afraid of an Italian Communist revolution than he is of a Metternichian reaction, which would demoralize the democratic elements that he believes exist in Italy. No Communist, he nevertheless warns that “we must not shut our eyes to the fact that large sections of the people of many European countries will look to Russia as a model for those political, social and economic reforms most beneficial to the masses.” Salvemini would like to introduce such reforms in Italy (and throughout Europe) “without bloodshed and through constitutional measures unhampered by reactionary upheavals.” What he proposes in theory is a combination of 20th-century socialism with 19th-Century republicanism. Salvemini also makes a number of specific proposals. Some of them:

> The confiscation of big properties and the nationalization of big business (“This is the only way … [to] provide that freedom from want preached in a major key by President Roosevelt. . . .”).

> Private ownership of small business.

> Large landed estates to be divided among the tenants and sharecroppers.

> A political Parliament, elected by popular vote, which would deal only with “general principles of law, foreign policy, customs duties, budgets,” etc.

> The National Council of Fasces and Corporations “purged of all Fascist connotations and composed of members elected by the various trades,” which would deal with national technical questions.

Of these and other proposals Professor Salvemini says: “This rough outline . . . may seem too simple and too optimistic to those who are familiar with the endless and difficult problems. . . . We have confidence in the Italian people.”

*Like Author Salvemini, Co-Author La Piana is also a distinguished history professor, also a naturalized American.

†Professor Salvemini is author of a life of Mazzini.