The Press: Americanization of Mr. Pope

The best Italian refugee and Italian-American brains in the U.S. last week launched in New York City a new anti-Fascist paper, Il Mondo (“An Italian Daily with American Ideals”). Even as it appeared, democracy won a dramatic victory over Fascism in the U.S. Italian-language press.

One main purpose of Il Mondo was to undercut the biggest two Italian dailies of the U.S., Il Progresso Italo-Americana and Correire d’America, owned by New York sand and gravel Tycoon Generoso Pope. For Publisher Pope has often been accused of hobnobbing with Fascist bigshots, of employing Fascists on his editorial staffs, of printing pro-American editorials in English and pro-Mussolini editorials in Italian.

But the very day that Il Mondo appeared, the New York Post published on its front page an interview in which Generoso Pope declared: “The quicker Hitler and the Axis powers are destroyed the better off the world will be. And when I say Axis powers that includes Mussolini.”

Actually Publisher Pope had made no overnight about-face. If he once catered to the pro-Fascist sympathies of many of his subscribers, he publicly expressed his embarrassment when Italy joined Hitler in the war, when Mussolini took up antiSemitism. Avowed Fascists gradually disappeared from his papers and his U.S.-born, U.S.-educated son Fortune (24 years old, 6 ft. 2 in. tall) was given more & more editorial authority.

The final turning point came six weeks ago when Publisher Pope put his papers in the hands of the high-powered public-relations firm of Institute of Public Relations, Inc. Soon to a Montana internment camp went Il Progresso’s No. 1 reporter Gene Rea, reported in a feature article that Italian prisoners were mostly happy, excellently treated. Other similar stories followed.

Last week Il Mondo, disbelieving Generoso Pope’s “newfound loyalty,” challenged him to print his denunciation of Mussolini in his own papers in Italian. A couple of days later he did.