The Italian Americans’ pro-fascist lobby in the United States: Continuities and discontinuities with the liberal regime

Abstract

Studies have highlighted the role of fascism in shaping Italian immigrants in the United States and their progeny into a pressure group that influenced Washington's foreign policy to the benefit of Italy. That interpretation has drawn primarily on Italian Americans’ mobilization to prevent the US Congress from passing sanctions against Mussolini's regime during the Ethiopian War and to financially support that colonial venture. Yet, fascism initially hesitated to resort to Italian Americans’ lobbying potential. The exploitation of their political clout implied the newcomers’ acquisition of US citizenship and their children's disavowal of their parents’ nationality. This course of action apparently conflicted with the retention of the immigrants’ allegiance to the homeland and, consequently, met the opposition of Fascist ideologues in Italy and of leaders of the fasci in the United States. Furthermore, contrary to conventional scholarly wisdom, Mussolini's regime conceived nothing new when it urged Italian Americans to mobilize politically and forged them into a pro-Fascist lobby. Rather, it replicated a strategy that Vittorio Rolandi Ricci, the last Liberal ambassador in Washington, had already envisaged.